Ray’s heart beat as fast as a runaway train as he rushed towards the Lord of the Second Floor. He cast his buffs as he moved. Goliath Eater to boost all his stats and raise his power. His constant increase of its Tiers helped it activate even after reducing the difference in levels somewhat.
He had also used Vengeful Plunder, ready to raise his power even further with every successful hit. The Floor Lord wouldn’t know what hit her.
His sudden charge had finally caused a change in her. Her eyes thinned a little, her jaw tautening like the string of a bow with an arrow nocked. She was finally serious about facing him.
Which probably explained the sudden shift in gravity. Oh, she wasn’t holding back. For all that the Floor Lord was prideful and evil, she wasn’t stupid.
She wasn’t underestimating Ray.
He cursed. It would have been a lot easier if she kept assuming he actually was a bug she could simply crush under her heels.
Ray’s charge towards his target was forced to change as the plane of gravity shifted. It was coming from above now, if that even counted as above. His flight was inexorably drawn upwards and away from his target.
“Could you not?” the king screamed from the other end of the hall.
It was a little hard to twist his head around to look, but Ray spotted both the Everstead ruler and Kredevel losing their footing. Like Ray, they were both floating upwards as though they had all been teleported into the ISS.
“Deal with it,” the Floor Lord said. Unlike Ray, she hadn’t taken her eyes off her opponent.
Ray focused on his actual fight. Primal Spiritcraft constructed two draconic maws around his hands, with which he fired the laser breaths the next second. They bent. It was kind of wild seeing them curve around like that. But Ray had aimed them at a spot below the Floor Lord, which meant the new gravity’s effect was actually redirecting them towards his opponent.
Who was still way too fast. She swerved away, the beams rushing past and causing her original location to explode.
Ray was already casting knowing that he had no choice but to keep up the pressure. Lifeblood Soulform created two draconic maws—
That were immediately cut down. Call of the Cosmos dotted the area with a bunch of purple voids, from which emerged simultaneous slashes from the Floor Lord’s Growth Mana sword. Ray’s constructs were crushed apart the very instant after they came into being.
Calling the Floor Lord fast was an understatement.
She was casting too, even quicker than Ray himself. The air, the very space itself, all twisted. Ray looked up to see two huge spatial rents crisscrossing each other, lightning flickering in their depths as energy gathered. And the Floor Lord’s new gravity was taking him straight to his demise.
Just as the energy from the rent burst free in arcs of coruscating lightning, Ray decided to put his plan into action. He used Spectral Step.
The throne room disappeared. Instead, as the world readjusted itself back in his senses, he found himself in a little room. A small, back-red bee floated in beside him.
He grinned. Little guy wasn’t even buzzing.
Ray faced the ceiling. Then he aimed both his draconic maws high up, unleashing their chaotic breaths at the same time.
He had used Lifeblood Soulform to create a Scouring Eyeball a while back. It was keeping an eye on the entire battlefield of the throne room, allowing Ray to pinpoint exactly where he had to aim his draconic maws to make the lasers hit.
Ray had to drink in the look of surprise on the Floor Lord’s face. The floor exploded as the two lasers crushed through.
They struck. Not fully. Her reactions were still too fast. The sword came up to block the beams of compressed, black-red fire. But they left their chaotic imprint all the same, the Floor Lord falling back with a rasping cry as her flesh and horns around her shoulder corrupted.
Ray wasn’t done, of course. Another Spectral Step got him to the end of the laser beams, floating high near the ceiling of the throne room.
A spot from which he could cast Mottling Spiritguard twice to summon up almost three dozen orbs of sparking energy. Lifeblood Soulform created the Viledrake tail at his back, allowing him to imbue the orbs with Molten Mana with Origin Resonance. Then he flung the entire salvo at the Floor Lord. All in mere seconds.
The Floor Lord cursed. Actually cursed. Ray grinned. Now wasn’t that a victory.
But that wasn’t her only response. Projected Growth created a forest of hornlike protrusions all around her, armouring her against Ray’s devastating salvo. He was just glad he had imbued them with Molten Mana. They melted the Floor Lord’s defence.
Unfortunately, that didn’t count as direct hits, as they didn’t activate Vengeful Plunder’s boon. Ray’s stats didn’t rise. Annoying.
The last couple of Spiritguard orbs never struck in. Ray held them back. The majority had been spent destroying the Floor Lord’s Projected Growth spikes. Leaving the way open for an actual attack. He converted the last two orbs into flying draconic maws, sending them in to assault the Sylvan.
Ray himself joined in to keep applying the pressure. That was what this fight was about. Maintaining the pressure so the Floor Lord never had a chance to attack him.
But his opponent wasn’t defenceless. The Floor Lord exploded.
A storm of bright, bluish fire erupted all around her. The eruption destroyed the constructs in a flash, charring them to ash that dissipated long before they reached their target. Ray himself had twisted just enough so that it was his Viledrake tails swinging in to strike the Floor Lord. But even the tail was burned and destroyed before it could connect.
Those flames were something else. Within the inferno, the Floor Lord smouldered, burning with rage.
“Enough,” she said. “Now you die.”
Ray cast Mottling Spiritguard. “Try your worst.”
He used the Spiritguard orbs to construct a defence. He cast Lifeblood Soulform to call up his Imitator construct at the same time. It was a little miracle how he wasn’t panicking. His thoughts were clear, the actions he needed to take appearing without any desperation.
The Floor Lord’s Comet Strike shot in like a meteor. Ray’s defence was nothing against it. Even after he had used his Mana Infuser ring to raise Mottling Spiritguard’s Tier.
That was fine. Ray was already gone. Spectral Step had taken him to another little room with another little bee for company. He almost wished he had some time to pet the little thing. But his attention was fixed entirely on the throne room, on the battlefield now half burning with the blue flames of Comet Strike.
Ray’s Imitator construct was burning inside the conflagration, turned to ash in just a breath or two. And now, it was time for the actual Ray to—
“Foolish insect,” the Floor Lord said, floating in her storm of fire. “Do you think I failed to notice that you disappeared once again?”
His heartrate spiked as the blue flames slammed in. Comet Strike destroyed the floor, crashing through the palace to reach the room Ray had teleported to. But he didn’t burn.
Not when he used Spectral Step to reappear behind the Floor Lord.
He thrust his arms ahead of him, immediately unleashing the lasering draconic breaths. Ray had fired them as soon as he had appeared. He hadn’t even waited for the world to stop spinning. His aim had already been measured. It was true. Especially since he hadn’t given the Floor Lord any time to react.
The beams of compressed chaotic flames crashed into the Floor Lord’s back. Her shriek cut off as she slammed forward, crashing into the same location she had sent her Comet Strike.
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“Beautiful explosion, huh?” Ray said, a geyser of black, red, and blue rising before him.
The two little bees floating behind him didn’t reply. He might have granted them a bit of his intelligence, after converting two Spiritguard orbs into the constructs, but that didn’t mean they had mouths and larynxes to talk with.
A good thing about the explosion was that it afforded Ray a minuscule amount of time to check in on Kredevel’s fight against the king of the Everstead.
His friend was holding his own well. Well enough, in fact, that the king was still way too preoccupied trying to kill the actual Sylvan he was facing. There was a strangeness that made Ray’s spine shiver, though. The Arch Imitator was slowly reverting back to his actual state as a silvery blob.
And so was the throne room around him.
It concerned Ray a bit. Was the transformation of the king tied to the transformation of the room itself? Was that how it worked?
He had no time to ponder it. The room near Ray was still the same old throne room. Solid. Burning. Broken. The debris began shifting as the Floor Lord climbed out, a withering expression frozen on her face.
“Really?” Ray asked. “You can’t stay down?”
Even as she rose back to the throne room proper, the wounds Ray’s attack had left were healing. Did she have that much Recovery to spare? Or was something else going on? She was crushing a Mana shard of some kind, an amethyst gem disintegrating to glittering dust in her hands.
Well, whatever. Ray would just need to pummel her until she stopped coming back up.
He cast Mottling Spiritguard again, imbuing the orbs with Molten Mana. They glowed like dozens of suns around him.
The spheres shot forward, just as Ray himself did. But the Floor Lord cast Call of the Cosmos. Little blobs of dark void materialized all around the throne too. When she slashed her sword burning with blue flames through the pocket of the void in front of her, the slicing blade burst out through all the voids. All of Ray’s Spiritguard orbs were cut down in a single second.
He didn’t let it dismay him. Instead, he pulled back, away from all the lava exploding everywhere. If he was assuming right, then…
Ray fired his draconic maws’ laser breaths into the nearest voids. If the Floor Lord’s sword could come out of the nearby voids, then that had to mean that anything going into them would exit from the void right next to the Floor Lord.
He was right. The laser breaths did emerge from the blob of darkness farther off.
But it wasn’t close enough to the Floor Lord anymore. None of the void pockets were. She had apparently understood Ray’s intention before he had even begun to execute it. It might have been experience, something she had faced before. Or maybe she could just think that fast during battles.
Whatever the case, Ray found himself, all the remaining bits of burning lava, and the void pockets drawn towards a single point. The Floor Lord was manipulating gravity again, pulling in everything to a single location.
So when Ray’s compressed beams of fiery chaos burst out, they still failed to reach the Floor Lord. The pull of gravity was strong enough that the beams were frozen in mid-air.
Not for long, of course. Ray was still firing the lasering breaths, even as he was being pulled inexorably towards the centre of gravity. Which could only lead to one thing.
An explosion.
Ray was spared the detonation when he used Spectral Step. He disappeared, only to reappear inside another small chamber underneath the throne room. Not that he was fully spared from the massive explosion occurring overhead. His ears rang, his whole body shaking along with the chamber.
He frowned, his heart picking up its pace. The world was continuing to shake, the tremors getting worse, the destruction growing. That explosion should have been a one-and-done deal. What was going on?
Ray’s Scouring Eyeball revealed the truth. The Floor Lord had used Shattered Cosmos. Enormous rents had crisscrossed across the throne room’s ceiling, raining down their destructive bolts of energy everywhere. Continuously raining them, forcing them to crush through the floor and burrow in deeper.
He froze. She was coming for him.
The Floor Lord knew that he was hidden somewhere underneath the throne room, so she was destroying the room itself to get to him. She was eviscerating everything in order to flush him out. Fuck.
Of course, Ray had a backup prepared. He teleported with Spectral Step once again. This time, he reappeared on the roof.
It had been a good idea to send a bee outside of the palace itself, while still keeping it close. Relieved as he was not to be crushed under the barrage of space-lightning from the Floor Lord, he still cringed a little. She had taken out one of his main advantages. There went teleporting to get away and strike from underneath.
Because the Floor Lord wasn’t stopping. Shattered Cosmos continued to belch its out power, sending the bolts of energy streaming for several floors below the throne room.
The whole palace was going to collapse at this rate.
“You think I do not know that you have hidden yourself again, little insect?” Her voice boomed, the air ringing and vibrating. “No matter where you hide, you will not escape your death.”
She was quite literal about that promise. In just a second, Ray felt himself once again drawn inexorably towards the throne room. That damn gravity again.
It was worse this time. While Shattered Cosmos had finally stopped, the Floor Lord’s new point of gravity had enough pulling power to destroy the remainder of the throne room. Chunks of the palace wall tore apart, the remaining windows shattering, the debris on the floor and from several floors down below all coagulating towards the Floor Lord.
“Stop.” It was the king yelling now. The ruler of the Everstead had half-deconstructed into his sludgy, Imitator form, desperately trying to hold onto a still stable piece of the floor. “You’re destroying everything! Cease before you shatter us all.”
His words went ignored. The Floor Lord’s arms were raised high, almost like she was praying. She didn’t care who or what got sucked into her gravitational vortex. It didn’t matter. So long as her real enemy died.
Ray was struggling, but he quickly realized it was futile. There was nowhere he could go. He could attempt to throw out his draconic laser breaths farther out, teleport to their ends to escape being drawn into the Floor Lord’s centre of gravity,
But that would take him far out of the palace, where he would promptly plummet. He might not die in the fall, but he was definitely going to essentially be exiting the battlefield.
And he was not going to run away.
Sparks burst out of the point where everything was being condensed. Matter being converted into pure energy. This power was insane.
Desperate, Ray used Lifeblood Soulform to call up several of his summons. Four Greater Windbane Maws appeared and immediately began flying into the mass in the middle. But not before they began belching out their lasering breaths.
Ray yelled out and added his on lasers to the mix. Both arms pointed straight at the Floor Lord and sent out compressed beams of fire, so the total became six.
A half-dozen massive beams of chaotic energy crashed into the Floor Lord’s gravity well.
That was when she brought her hands down and slapped them together.
All the matter and energy that had gathered at that one location compressed even more massively than they had already done. A new burst of energy formed up, imploding into being at a single point in space. Burning and glowing brighter and brighter every instant.
Turning into a star. The Floor Lord was taking no prisoners.
Ray’s eyes widened. The Floor Lord had an ability to do just that, if he remembered right. A spell to create a fucking star of all things. She was doing it now of all times. This was bad.
Heat and light washed the chamber. Ray was already sweating, his skin turning almost unbearably hot. All the air had turned supercharged, starting to rush about like he was in a storm. The king of the Everstead had stopped yelling out, but he had now almost fully turned into his Imitator form, almost like he had melted.
Ignoring everything else in the vicinity, the Floor Lord pointed a single finger at Ray. The star flew at him.
No time. There was no time to do anything. No time to dodge, no time to even curse. The star came in so fast. All Ray could do was instinctively call upon his Impervious Shell, creating a layer of powerful defences between himself and the star a millisecond before it made contact.
One shell wasn’t going to be anywhere near enough, of course. Ray had cast Lifeblood Soulform several times in as quick a succession as he could. This had led to several Duskshell shells appearing before him, all arrayed in front and stacked against each other. Just in the nick of time to block the star’s impact.
The detonation wasn’t something Ray was ever going to forget. His ears went completely numb at the noise. For a split second, there was a gargantuan roar. Then the silence hit. He was practically deaf.
Alongside the noise, a flash of impossibly bright light blinded him and a wash of heat started vaporizing his skin off his flesh and melting the meat underneath. A fleeting second made Ray actualize the fact that he was being struck by a star. This was practically what it felt like to be struck by an atom bomb.
And this was all after he was blocking the worst of the power from the Floor Lord using his Impervious Shell. Insane didn’t even being to cover it.
The rest of Ray was busy pouring every single iota of his Recovery into healing everything. Well, only the parts of him that were necessary to keep him alive. He made sure his eyes didn’t vaporize, that his head wasn’t burnt to ash, that his torso wasn’t overly affected.
It helped that he remembered his Vestment’s powers. Using Lifeblood Soulform to call up the Viledrake tail offered him Molten Mana. He created more of the Mana variant using Abstract Conversion to plug all his Vestment’s different parts with it. That helped greatly to protect him against the unbearable, impossible heat of a fucking star.
But how long could he take this? The Impervious Shell constructs were all being destroyed, turning to sludge that then vaporized long before falling off the shell itself.
He couldn’t teleport away either. All the bees had been drawn in by the gravity before being destroyed, and any other constructs would be destroyed—
The Scouring Eyeball. He still had one construct left.
Ray was just about to use Spectral Step when the blows came in from behind. It was so bright that his eyeball from far above couldn’t tell what was happening. He had no trouble understanding, though.
Loud clangs alerted him that the Valorous Back Shield was doing its job. That alert came too late, though.
One strike punched a hole through his upper arm and leg on the right side. His shoulder was crushed by an overhead blow. The worst one slammed into his head from the side, crushing his cheekbones, jaws, and ears.
The Floor Lord had finally gotten him.
While Ray had been distracted by the star, she had created more void pockets behind him. From there, it took only a single swipe of her sword to finally beat Ray down.
Just before things went dark, all Ray could think that maybe, just maybe, she had proven that she was indeed superior to him. So much for payback. Then he noticed something strange as he fell.
The floor. What remained of it was entirely liquid. A mirrorlike silver, the consistency of the Imitator constructs. The throne room was reverting back to its Imitator form.
A surge of hope flooded Ray, one instant before he lost consciousness and fainted from his injuries.