“Lucky Strike!”
Alarion’s mace caught the descending creature in the abdomen as it fell upon him from above. Ribs fractured under the strike, the feline’s body going concave around the head of the mace as it was flung deep into the undergrowth with a rustle of leaves and a wet thud.
It did not get up.
Alarion kept his eyes focused on the twisted mass of vines and tall grass that concealed the body of the ‘defeated’ creature. He’d received no kill notification from the System, and he had no desire to be the subject of a second surprise attack. Had the animal not dragged its paw when it leapt down on him from above, their positions might have been reversed.
It didn’t take long to find the body. The cat-creature was curled up in upon itself, wheezing and growling weakly at his approach. It posed no threat, its ruined form barely clinging to life, its eyes full of malice. It wasn’t a fiend as he’d first expected, but some sort of monstrously oversized cat. A familiar wave of revulsion pulsed through Alarion’s body as he recognized the beast for what it was.
A Revenant.
> You have slain [Revenant – UCL 31]
Alarion felt a wave of relief and satisfaction as he ended the monstrosity, as though he’d righted some universal wrong with nothing more than the swing of his mace. Which made it all the more unsettling when he looked at the twice deceased Revenant and felt… nothing. What had disgusted him moments earlier was now just the body of a large, dead cat. If anything, he felt a sympathetic pang for the poor thing.
“Sorry…” he murmured.
Alarion had always liked cats, if for no other reason that they shared a certain kinship. Independent. Quiet. Ruthless and antisocial.
Hell, most of them probably had Avian Bane as well. Or they would if they were awakened.
… Could a housecat awaken?
The sound of a branch snapping somewhere in the distance brought Alarion back into the moment. He was not alone in this jungle, and this was a combat challenge. It was safe to assume that anything prowling around in the brush meant him harm.
Alarion pushed his way through the heavy growth as he moved toward the gushing waterfall. He needed to get his bearings, and a landmark was the first step in that process. The fact that the area around the waterfall was relatively free of the claustrophobic foliage was an added bonus.
As was the sheer beauty of the scene that lay before him.
The cascading water was so awe inspiring that Alarion was half certain that Valentina had woven some magic into her creation. The pool at its base was an aquamarine blue that Alarion had never seen in nature, so vibrant that it made his eyes sting. It looked shallow, no deeper than his waist, with the signs of small critters of some kind or another gliding just beneath its surface.
The waterfall was much taller than he’d expected. What little he’d seen through gaps in the canopy had not been its peak, but only the first of three tiers as the water cascaded down from high overhead.
“Where do I even start?” Alarion muttered as he emerged into the clearing and took in his surroundings. The waterfall was to his back, with endless green occupying all other directions. There was no timer visible in the challenge, nor any obvious or even subtle hints of what he should do to progress.
Was he just supposed to fight the monsters as they came? Or find his way out of the jungle? Would this place loop like the endless white hallways of the first test? Or would he find a definitive end if he followed that stream far enough. Was he even still in the dungeon?
A growl from his left interrupted Alarion’s train of thought.
It was another cat, this one dark furred and lanky by comparison to the first. The undead monster prowled the edge of the wood line, slinking between one tree and the next. Its eyes were always on him, watching. Waiting.
Alarion spared a momentary glance over his shoulder and his intuition was rewarded with another set of mirrored eyes. The revenant hadn’t attacked him because it was waiting for backup.
Mana flowed through Alarion’s body, feeding into his two-handed mace. The light around it began to warp and dim, as though the mace itself were bending the fabric of reality. Alarion hefted the mace over one shoulder, then drove it down with a cry. “Void Crush!”
A wave of darkness sprung forth the moment Alarion’s weapon struck the earth. It travelled along the ground, following the uneven jungle topography with its bumps and dips as it rushed toward the first of the two Revenants. The cat was quick, but what Alarion’s new spell had lost in distance it made up for in size, catching the back half of the animal as it tried to dodge out of the way of the unfamiliar attack.
> You have slain [Revenant – UCL 33]
Alarion had no time to bask in the glory of his victory. He muttered the word “Quicken” under his breath and felt mana flow through his limbs once again, this time accelerating his movements. Even with the magical burst of speed Alarion was unable to strike the Revenant as it pounced upon him and had to settle for blocking a brutal swipe of its claw with the shaft of his weapon.
Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.
It might have been lower level, but the cat was much faster than he was. And more suited to its environment. It knew how to fight in a jungle, its every step measured and careful while Alarion kept getting stuck in the muddy ground that surrounded the stream. It struck when he was weak, lashing out with quick slaps from its paw, then retreating before he could retaliate.
Simply put, it was a bad match up. Not an unwinnable fight by any means, but one where victory would cost him something. Surprise, time, MP or HP, the question was only what price he chose to pay.
The back and forth emphasized just how lucky Alarion had been to land decisive blows on his first two opponents. Twice the cat raked him with its claws, digging into his HP pool and twice it evaded his counter-attacks. Each failure cost him mobility as the cat cut off easy escape routes and drove him back toward the cliff face and the waterfall.
It was a familiar sensation, though thankfully nowhere near as dangerous as the one he recalled. With nowhere to run, he stepped back into the pond.
The water was refreshingly cool compared to the oppressive jungle air, though it stung the three long scratches the beast had carved into his left shin. Mud squelched beneath his sandals and something skittered over the top of his foot as he backpedaled further into the water, away from razor sharp claws.
The Revenant did not seem keen to join him. It patrolled the shore of the pond, taking short swipes whenever it thought he was close enough. It growled at him, never more than a step away. But it refused to enter the water.
“Afraid to swim?” taunted Alarion, hoping to break the stand off.
Alarion was convinced that its subsequent snarl was some sort of feline slur.
Revenants were supposed to be intelligent. If it was, then it understood the situation as well as he did. Its power was in its speed, and being almost entirely submerged would nullify that advantage. It couldn’t swim in to join him, nor could it kill him from shore. Meanwhile his attacks were wholly ineffective, even with the advantage of reach. Neither could meaningfully harm the other without a slip up or a sacrifice. It wasn’t coming into the water, and Alarion sure as hell wasn’t coming out of it.
Not for the first time, Alarion missed his shifting greatsword. The mace was a good weapon. A strong weapon, but apart from its use as a magical focus, it was rather… direct. Even for him.
He needed something clever to change the calculus of the fight. But before he was able to devise a plan, the math changed itself. Whether they’d made too much of a commotion, or whether the challenge was set to provide him with new opponents at a steady clip; the stalemate ended with the arrival of two more Revenants.
Alarion swung his mace through a wide arc toward the closest cat, driving it a step back from the edge of the pool as he reassessed his options. With one cat the solution had been easy, he simply had to keep on the far side of the pond, and it could not reach him. With three of them all striking from different angles, there no longer was a ‘far side’. He could defend himself against one. Maybe two. Which meant at least one of the three had to die.
Quickly.
The mace struck out with newly renewed ferocity as Alarion waded toward the far end of the pool, where the excess water started to trickle off into the jungle in the form of a stream. One of the cats had planted itself there, barring his way. It nimbly dodged each attack thrown its way, focusing on its own defense as its two compatriots focused on offense.
Claws raked over Alarion’s exposed arm, but the beasts still hesitated around the edge of the pool, unwilling to commit even as he moved into the shallows. He threw his weapon into another horizontal sweep and was satisfied to see the cats dodge back predictably, right before they lunged back in for a united strike.
“Solar Burst!”
One of the few advantages of Alarion’s flaw was that the spells it forced him to choose were quick. He had no need for complicated and time-consuming components for his spells. Material, somatic and verbal components existed to stabilize, and structure bound fields that Alarion simply didn’t use. It left him less flexible but meant that most spells he could cast were as simple as flaring his mana and incanting the name.
The other advantage, the only real advantage, made itself known as a white-hot inferno of fire erupted from Alarion’s body.
His nova spells were far more powerful than they had any right to be. One moment he was facing a losing battle against a trio of opponents, the next they were flailing about, searing white flames crackling across their bodies as they struggled to extinguish them. One cat died under Alarion’s mace, and another tore a substantial gouge out of his side in a desperate attempt at retribution just before it died.
But curiously, none of the three made an attempt to douse themselves in the pond. Not even as the last died an agonizing death.
Not that Alarion was doing much better.
“Nngh…” Alarion groaned as he slumped down at the edge of the pool, one hand pressing down hard on the heavy wound on his left-hand side. That wound was likely the least of his problems as Alarion scanned his notifications:
> You have suffered severe spell backlash. HP -173
>
> You have slain [Revenant – UCL 30]
>
> You have slain [Revenant – UCL 33]
>
> You have slain [Revenant – UCL 31]
There was a reason he didn’t lead with Solar Burst. Like most Sun Affinity spells, its power came at the cost of both HP and MP. Worse yet, the actual cost of 100 HP listed on the spell was less a rule and more of a minimum, or a guideline. Any nova spells he cast would hit drastically above his weight, but their cost scaled correspondingly.
If he’d let it, that spell could have burned through his entire HP pool in an instant. As it was, he needed a casting of Mend Body just to get his HP back above zero before the penalty kicked in.
He couldn’t afford another fight like that one. Not wounded as he was. He’d expected the challenge to be difficult, but not ‘blow through most of your HP and MP in the first few minutes’ difficult. How was Valentina balancing these things?
He’d need to find somewhere secure. Perhaps he could scale the cliffs, find some sort of choke point where they would have to come at him one at a-
“Agh!” Alarion yelped as he pulled his hand free of the pond. One of his many cat scratches had dipped into the water, and it stung like hell.
It stung?
Alarion dipped his hand into the pond, then brought it back to his lips. The water was cool, but it did nothing to quench his thirst.
It was too salty for that.
He looked to the scorched body of one of the nearby Revenants, a nearly forgotten memory clicking into place. It was the salt water of the Middle Sea that kept the fiends trapped on their island, and it was the salt water of the pond that had kept the Revenants from surrounding him during his fight.
“But why here?” Alarion asked, looking up at the falling water. It made no sense for there to be a waterfall of salt water in the middle of a jungle.
Not unless it was part of the challenge.
Alarion re-entered the pool with a grunt, wading across its shallow depths to the far side where endless waves of white capped water fell from above. He lifted a hand and pushed it into the crashing water. Then through it.
Into concealed cave just behind the waterfall.