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Mantle of the Gods
Book 3 - The Replacement - Chapter 22

Book 3 - The Replacement - Chapter 22

It was a stupid plan.

I’d heard Adventurers talk about cheesy wins they’d had and how one time out of a hundred, or a thousand, or even a million was all that would have worked. They’d talked about how many Adventurers they’d seen die doing something stupid like this, but I thought it might just be crazy enough to work.

I charged.

The Slime ignored me, which was the first thing that I’d counted on. Earlier, I’d proven that I couldn’t cut it and my spells hadn’t made it very deep. Except it hadn’t seen all my spells.

When I reached the slime, I threw out both of my hands and jammed them into the monster up to my elbows.

“SIPHON!” I yanked back as hard as I could.

I’d been trying to figure out what the spell did ever since the dud in the boss room back at Zeb. According to what I could find, it was a debuff skill that was mainly used to drain blood out of a bleeding target faster.

The insides of the slime were basically all body fluids and when I yanked out my arms, I made it bleed a little.

Siphon made it bleed a lot.

Acidic fluid sprayed out of it. “DASH!” I began to backpedal to get out of the way. I clasped both of my hurting hands together and aimed for the main body. "Pebble shot!”

The two larger projectiles tore walnut sized holes into the monster and out the other side. I’d been careful to aim so that I wouldn’t hit any of my party members, just in case it did go through. I watched the core move up as I lined up another shot.

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“PEBBLE SHOT!”

It felt like my blood sugar plummeted. I went down on one knee. If the tendrils had been worried about anything other than plugging the holes, then it might have been bad for me.

“Harden!” Aelin shouted behind me.

I pulled out my sword and forced myself to stand up. The world wasn’t spinning anymore, but I knew I couldn’t use dash at the moment. In fact, running or moving fast at all was off the table.

I watched Rix’s chain wrap around the monster where Aelin had hardened it. The chain ripped through the gelatinous body, severing the core from the main body.

“MAGIC ARROW! MAGIC ARROW! MAGIC ARROW!”

The chain knife shot into the smaller slime body as well. The core tried to move, but there were too many projectiles and too little space.

One of the magic arrows hit the core, but didn’t shatter it. Boss cores were stronger than regular monster cores and Aelin wasn’t strong enough to break one in a single hit.

“WHAT?!?” Aelin stomped. "I hit it! That’s not fair! I hit it!”

“Hit it again!” I began walking backwards as the core fell in the puddle of the larger body on the floor.

I’d hoped that separating the core from the main body would be enough to evaporate the main body. That trick wouldn’t work a second time and I wasn’t sure that I had enough magic to try it a second time.

“Atlas!” Ether was pointing at the puddle.

At first I was confused, but then I realized what Ether was trying to get my attention about.

The tendrils were still full and wriggling on the ground trying to pull fluid back into the main body. The body slowly started to rise up even with the attacks Rix and Aelin were throwing at it. The tendrils were intercepting attacks to give the body time to recover.

My mind was reeling. The body was only seven feet tall now. We’d destroyed about a third of it, but that didn’t exactly mean much because our trick had been a one off.

Though I had learned something. I just had to figure out how to use it.

But at least now I knew we were fighting three monsters.