Chapter 52 - The Corruptor’s Realm VI

Claire heaved a sigh as she watched the encroaching horde advance on her location. Finding an escape route seemed next to impossible. Molten river aside, the monsters were coming from every direction. She was cut off from the tunnel and the city’s translucent walls made it nearly impossible for her to sneak around undetected.

The only upside, if there was an upside, was that the swarm didn’t account for the whole city’s population. She could see a clear start and end to the wave; only those within a certain distance of the explosion had bothered to react. Hardly a notable recourse.

There wasn’t any real way for her to thin out the crowd. None of her skills were particularly well suited to large scale extermination. But that wasn’t to say that she was without any ideas. The halfbreed started by retreating to the river’s closest bank and summoning the snake that was her trump card.

“Finally, a chance to kill things!” The silvery-blue serpent rose off her shoulder and craned its neck as high as it would go. Its gaze was like that of a rabid wolf’s, brimming with fervour and excitement despite the unfavourable situation.

The first to arrive were the bats, if they could even be thought of as bats. Their antennae bearing frames were adorned with disproportionately large insectoid limbs that would have looked more appropriate on grasshoppers ten times the tiny mammals’ sizes. Trailing far behind the chiropterans were the borroks. Like the winged rats, the airborne half-monkeys had cared little for the terrain and its obstructions, but they were less than half as fast.

Ramming seemed to be the monsters’ primary means of attack. The leggy rodents charged straight at her as soon as they got within striking distance. And in doing so, rushed straight to their deaths.

Claire began casting as soon as they entered her range. The mage had yet to read the freshly evolved skill’s description, so she didn’t know her domain’s measurements off the top of her head. But she didn’t need to. Something inside of her provided an intuitive understanding of her reach. At a quick glance, it felt roughly twice as large.

The first two bats to fly too close were wrenched right out of the sky, reeled in like fish on a line. They struggled and fought back, desperately flapping their wings to fight the magic’s influence, but try as they might, they were unable to overpower it. Once they were within reach of her fingers, Claire cancelled her spell, grabbed the bats by the wings, and hurled them into the lava.

Pained screeches filled her ears as the flying rodents were set ablaze. The flames clung to them like glue, spreading from hair to skin and skin to bone. Slowly but surely, they were reduced to ashes, with no hope of survival. Their deaths were gruesome, horrifying even, but aware of all the excruciating details Claire was not. The mage had already moved on. With her eyes on a particularly dense group of rodents, the halfbreed magically wrenched two fistfulls of lava out of the river and sent them hurtling through the air. Her winged victims performed evasive maneuvers. But there was no escape, not even with their featherless pinions working overtime. Any flier that got too close to dodging was pulled straight into an amorphous glob and met a fiery doom.

A basic loop was enough to rid Borrok Peak of its local pests. Repeating the simple but effective formula, Claire eliminated over a dozen bats before the borroks finally caught up. Like the winged rodents, the cat monkeys dove at her and leveraged their body weight as a primary means of attack. Their strikes and tackles were quick and sporadic, but they were unable to best her spirit guardian. Shouldersnake grabbed them out of the air, finished them with its fangs, and tossed their bloated corpses at the encroaching horde.

It was an effective strategy, but also one that revealed a major miscalculation—the assumption that detonating a borrok could serve as an effective means of offense.

Direct hits aside, only the weaker monsters suffered any real damage. None of the others seemed to care. The corrupted watchers and bears would regenerate any damage they took; entire limbs and organs were repaired and replaced in the blink of an eye. The warriors were even more indifferent. They were almost completely unaffected. The acidic explosions were incapable of getting past their fur. Even the weaker-looking wolves were unconcerned. The canines were far too quick on their feet to be caught in the borroks’ detonations.

Like the fliers, the ground dwellers didn’t reach her all at once. Leading the charge was a warrior atop a wolf. Mount and rider as one, they leapt at her, fangs bared and mandibles mincing. But Shouldersnake was the first to strike. The phantom lashed out at the toothy grey dog and sank its fangs into its neck. An easy kill.

Despite the sudden change in his momentum, the warrior never lost his balance. He leapt off his companion before it hit the ground and engaged Claire in close combat.

She ducked and weaved past the monkey’s attacks, a barrage of agile, barefisted blows. Her eyes caught most of them before they reached her. Those that she failed to see were picked up by her ears; the whistling of the wind betrayed their presence.

Though she was never hit, the halfbreed found it nigh impossible to throw a counter. The monster’s technique was too polished. Each blow was chained perfectly into the next. Hooks were followed by jabs and masked with kicks, often aimed at her legs and feet. Unnatural elbow strikes were delivered in tandem with uppercuts and headbutts, and she was even subject to an onslaught led by its tail. The flurry didn’t look like it would end, no matter how many hits she evaded.

Shouldersnake was able to get a few attacks in while she focused on dodging, but none were grievous enough to deter the anti-borrok. It didn’t seem to care about any of her poisons and all the holes left by the snake’s fangs would close shortly after they were inflicted.

So she gave up on dodging.

The mage let go of her club as she allowed the borrok to punch her in the shoulder. Her serpentine spirit arm got to work the moment the two made contact; she wrapped Shouldersnake around the warrior’s limb and constricted it, locking it in place.

Closing her fingers into a fist, she cast a spell to pull the soldier towards her. It tried to break free of her grip by pulling back, but kicking it in the shin stopped its retreat. She lashed out with her fists once she had it secured. Over and over she struck at its head. Her fingers were bloodied and broken by the repeated impacts. But so too was the creature’s face.

Its allies tried to save it. The bats and borroks tackled her and bit into her flesh, but they couldn’t get her off. She didn’t rise until her bones started snapping back in place.

A group of wolves accosted her as she got to her feet, but a glare robbed them of their momentum. The only two outside her immediate field of view were stopped by force magic; the arcane vectors crashed into their feet and knocked them off balance.

Claire wanted to use the lava to end them, as she had the bats and borroks, but she didn’t have the time to cast two spells on each wolf. So she made up the difference by omitting a key step.

Rather than redirecting the molten rocks when they neared her hands, the halfbreed opted to grab them, to transform them into a set of unforged weapons that placed function over form. She smashed the fiery cobblestones straight into the monsters’ faces. Those whose mouths were open had their throats dammed shut, while those who did not found their faces broken and their brains splattered across the ice.

Bears and corrupted watchers were dealt with similarly; she used the lava to eliminate them as quickly as they came, their staggered arrivals her saving grace.

The reckless behaviour hurt the rogue nearly as much as it hurt her foes. Her hands were burning in agony and barely responding to her commands. Most of her skin had melted off and even her scales were blackened by the intense heat.

But never did her injuries persist.

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She had no idea how long the killing spree lasted, but everything around her was dead by the time she finally stopped to catch her breath. The only enemies that remained were the last to arrive, a group made of three distinct units, each made up of a warrior and a trio of corrupted watchers.

They were more cautious than the others, choosing teamwork and cooperation over blind aggression. Slowly, carefully, the group encircled her, one warrior to each of her sides and the last staring her down, face to face. Their companions filled in the gaps and cut her off from everything but the river. It was a well disciplined group. Even with the formation complete, not a single one of its members advanced until the leader, the two-tailed warrior standing directly in front of her, gave the order.

The borrokian soldier on her left was the first to engage. It ran towards her with its fists raised and its gaze burning with bloodlust, bloodlust that was soon replaced with confusion. The snake on her shoulder grabbed it by the tail and flung it straight towards the river. If not for the corrupted watcher closest to the shore, it would have fallen in and sunk to its death.

Second in line was the warrior on the left. It leapt at her feet first, a flying kick backed by the watcher it had used as a springboard. It was a laughably telegraphed attack. Claire was able to retrieve one of her daggers from a nearby corpse before it reached her. She moved to counter the gravity-powered attack with a blade between the monster’s legs, only to find her attack intercepted by the final warrior.

Buzzing angrily, the two-tailed freak dashed between them and punched her extended arm three times in the blink of an eye. Its attacks were so fast that she was barely able to follow its fist, let alone react. None of its attacks were even remotely close to deadly, but neither were they lacking in power. Her wrist was numbed just enough for it to knock her weapon away with another lightspeed jab.

Frustrated, Claire pulled her hand back as she ordered Shouldersnake to attack the half-primate in her stead. The serpent lurched forward and grabbed her original target by the leg. The two-tailed monkey tried to attack the phantom and prevent the swing that followed, but to no avail. Claire twisted the serpent’s body and avoided the flurry as she dunked the bug into the lava.

As it was fully submerged, the halfbreed was fairly certain that the warrior would meet a quick and untimely demise. But she decided to hold it beneath the surface, just in case.

In the meantime, she assaulted the two-tailed commander with a bony mace and a chitin blade. She lunged at it over and over, smashing, stabbing, and slashing with a far greater focus on speed than power. But she couldn’t land a hit. The two-tail used its superior speed and technique to sidestep her blows whilst throwing a disturbing number of counters, most of which dug straight into her ribs. Each individual strike was weak and inconsequential, but the commander more than made up for its lack of strength with its aim and battle sense. She couldn’t stop it from hammering her liver a dozen times over, nor could she do anything about the uppercuts that knocked her fangs out of their sockets.

She spat all her loose teeth at the two-tail at once, only for it to deflect them with the back of its fist. A major problem. Just like the warrior behind her. The one-tailed beast had started attacking her defenseless back right after she engaged its boss. The sound produced by its fists allowed her to evade them, but dodging came at a cost. The two-tail would hit her with extra force every time she responded to its partner.

A blast of fire and ash rocked the shoreline right as her health hit the one third mark. And with it came Shouldersnake’s triumphant return. The serpent grabbed her bone dagger on its way back and blinded the insect behind her with a quick two-pronged strike to the eyes.

The corrupted watchers stepped forward to take its place, but they stood down following a loud buzz from the two-tail. They tried to retrieve the blinded borrok as they backpedaled, but the phantom on her shoulder didn’t allow the retreat. It ripped the warrior out of their hands and snapped its legs as it chucked it into the river headfirst.

Panting heavily, Claire raised her fists and took half a step towards the final threat. From an outsider’s perspective, the battle looked like it required little effort on her part. But while it was true that Shouldersnake was doing most of the work, the ghastly spirit was anything but fully autonomous. She was in control, and it was her mana it expended, both to act and to maintain itself. But that was not why she was tired. The most exhausting part of all was the psychic link between them.

Keeping the snake’s bottomless wrath at bay was not by any means part of the equation. If anything, she was basking in its rage, using it as fuel to keep herself standing. The difficulty came instead from their shared senses. She could see everything it saw, hear everything it heard, and feel everything it felt. A blessing and a curse. Though she was able to control its body as naturally as she could her own, its speedy, erratic movements made for a series of vomit-inducing acrobatics that were much easier to describe than perform. Dipping the snake into the lava had only served to further worsen the experience; there was too much heat and light. None of it caused her any pain or grief, but processing the excess of information and dealing with a whole extra body was rapidly draining her mental energies. She was only able to sustain it in extended combat because that too was a resource that leveling up restored.

And level up she did.

Her second warrior kill took a load off her mind and flooded her with equal parts dopamine and adrenaline. In a matter of moments, she went from having blurred vision to seeing perfectly, from woozy to clear-minded, and from worn down to fully refreshed.

Unlike most of the other things she had fought, her opponent seemed to understand that the path to victory could not be paved with corpses. That was why it had ordered the corrupted watchers to back away. With the lava at her disposal, they were easy kills, foolish targets to be reaped and converted to experience. Just like all its other fallen comrades.

But in a strict one versus one, Claire’s weaponised danger noodle forced it on the defensive. It had to focus on the snake if it didn’t want to follow in its comrades’ footsteps. When it did retaliate, it did so cautiously. It never committed to its attacks, and she was always given plenty of time to react. What made the situation even worse for the borrok was the halfbreed’s adaptability. She was getting used to its technique, learning the barehanded martial art that served as the cornerstone of its battle prowess.

She started landing more hits as the exchange dragged on. Her blows grew sharper, faster, and more accurate. The monkey’s footwork was used as an example to improve her own. She started twisting her hips with each strike and angling her fists to deliver precise attacks on the monkey’s joints and vitals.

Before long, the borrok was the one with its back to the river. She started pressuring it with its own techniques, quick jabs, masked by powerful kicks and deadly hooks. Both its arms were soon broken by her relentless assault.

Once she got its legs, she knew it was time for the final execution. She drew her mace, raised it overhead, and took a deep breath as she moved to make its face one of its chest’s permanent features.

Only to be stopped by a bolt from the blue.

A dagger-sized shard of ice flew past her and embedded itself into the wall opposite the river. Followed by another. And another. And another. Glancing towards the source of the attack, she spotted a second group of borroks atop a set of nearby buildings, a dozen or so individuals with the left halves of their bodies as bugs and the right halves as monkeys. Their ears and tails sat on the sides of their waists. Still incorrectly placed, but less so than the warriors.

They were mages. Another variant specialised for combat.

Standing around the casters was a score of warriors, guards to stop her from getting in melee range, guards that were completely unnecessary. The spells alone were more than enough to keep her at bay. She couldn’t deal with them. At least one icicle was flying at her at any given point in time and some were even led, shot exactly where she was about to step.

Even without the ability to discern an insects’ expressions, Claire was well aware that the two-tail was giving her the equivalent of a smug grin. Its body was relaxed, in spite of its broken bones, and it was chittering quietly, as if to flaunt its victory.

With an irritated hiss, the halfbreed kicked the two-tail into the lava, magically retrieved the rest of her weaponry, and dashed through the corrupted watchers’ legs. Some of them had already died where they stood. Their allies had shot spells right through them in an attempt to slay her.

She tried sprinting into the suburb to use the buildings as cover, but the projectiles cleaved through them without the slightest bit of difficulty. They didn’t even slow down as they made contact with the walls. In fact, they seemed to do the opposite. Any spell that passed through a structure accelerated. The hastened projectiles were so fast that not even Shouldersnake was able to react. One nailed Claire right in the side and broke several ribs while another got her in the shoulder and disabled her left arm. They embedded themselves into her flesh, freezing in place after making contact.

The halfbreed grimaced, but bore with the pain. Her destination was already in sight. She just needed to push a tiny bit further.

“Don’t do it, Claire. It isn’t worth it.”

A malformed, palm-sized pony appeared on Claire’s shoulder as she rounded the final corner. The ghastly creature, which happened to be wearing a tophat for reasons unknown, was scowling in displeasure.

“Please, Claire, listen to me. I do not even wish to begin imagining how filthy it is. It isn’t worth your pride, our pride.”

“Shut up!” She screamed as another pair of spells pierced one of her legs.

“But you don’t even know what’s down there. It may very well be just as unsafe. They could even continue their pursuit.”

“Then we’ll just have to find out the hard way.”

Ignoring the horse’s hesitation, Claire dashed into the oddly-shaped purple building and leapt straight down its sulfur-scented pit.