Mikella didn’t know whether to punch Zeke or hug him when she’s done being pounded by gravity. It all happened so fast, but she at least understood what had just happened.
The boss seemed to go straight for her out of everyone else, and the only thing she could think of was because her Mikky bombs caused the most issues. Thanks to that, she became its prime first target. She knew that at the time she would’ve died, being out of it at the time, and that’s when Zeke pulled up his barrier around her.
But it was the mixture of two things–the kinetic force type of barrier and a superball barrier merged into one. Without one or the other, she would’ve died either from the axe blow or from landing into a wall and turning into meat paste.
Still, the way the superball barrier kept going around the chamber and even hitting the boss was not a fun ride, mostly because Zeke wasn’t able to fix her in position, so she kept slamming into the barrier left and right, up and down–the works.
It was hell inside that barrier, but her Endurance held firm along with her Vitality. All of her physical enhancing skills were working in tandem to ride this out as this was the clearly better option out of all of it. She certainly didn’t mind getting back at the bastard that caused all this.
Soon the superball lost its momentum after the several dozens worth of hits it made, and landed on the ground. Her vision was blurry but she still caught wind of her surroundings, to an extent. As the barrier slowed, it started to crack in places, so Mikella figured to just break it out from the inside. Compared to the outside, the inside was easily destroyed if she willed it hard enough.
The barrier shattered into pieces as she breathed heavily, blood flowing from her mouth and nose. She hit hard on a few places, but it wasn’t anything she couldn’t handle. Her eyes picked up some pretty bad scenes going on.
The boss monster was enraged and once again Val took over fighting it, but nobody else was around to help. Rather, everyone was gathered around Zeke who was actually on the ground, seizing up and shaking.
Her heart fell and she went over to his side, noticing Cloud healing him up with his spell. Looking up, Cloud turned back to Zeke.
“He used up a lot of mana, and that got his collar to activate. It ended up taking more out of him as a result,” Cloud said, not wasting time with pleasantries.
Mikella winced, gritting her teeth. Zeke went all out again, despite promising not to do it again. But she of all people can’t complain. If he hadn’t, Mikella might not even be alive to get angry at him. This was the sole thing she wanted to avoid this whole time, and yet she failed already.
Her fists gripped hard as she answered. “How’s everyone else?”
She saw Piker standing by Zeke and Cloud’s side, his sword raised and filling it with frost. She could tell that he first coated his sword with energy, a feature of his maxed out skill, then layered it completely in frost. It became a rather impressive shield made entirely of ice, and she could already feel the chill overtaking her. He was doing his job as the tank of the party despite being an Expert like them.
Meanwhile, Zacharia and Myra were working in tandem with Val. While she was taking most of the attention, Zacharia roared and swung his massive two-handed sword at its feet, using the earth to deliver powerful spikes at its ankles. Myra was constantly blazing around the waist, using her fire skills to hit it.
However, the boss was constantly moving and deflecting everything they threw at it. It was weakened to a degree, but they need one extra push.
Mikella looked back at Zeke, still trembling with his eyes closed. He can’t use more of those barrier bombs anymore, and she certainly wasn’t going to force him to. He did enough.
“Zeke, after this, we’re gonna have a long talk about your mana spending!”
Mikella shouted, not really knowing what exactly they plan on talking about, but she was still miffed as she summoned her sword. Thankfully she had the right mind to put it into her storage pack when everything went topsy-turvy from the tidal waves.
At the distance, she could actually hear Cloud muttering while chuckling. “Welcome to the married life, kid.”
She wanted to roll her eyes at that, but she ignored it. She narrowed her eyes, flaring Dragon Eyes to find, not too surprising, no weaknesses whatsoever. Still, with it active, she could increase her damage at the expense of Stamina.
She had quite a lot, considering she didn’t really do much throughout the fight, but she tried to find some way to do something to the boss.
Right now, the others were taking advantage of its weakened state, but it kept bashing about with its axe. There were even instances of the slashes flinging out waves of water so compressed that it actually cut one of the pillars when it landed. Considering how tough the entire chamber came out to be, seeing one of the pillars nearly cut in half by those rare water slashes, equaling to water pressure capable of cutting steel, made her nervous.
She ran, however, ignoring her doubts. Her mind worked faster, figuring out an answer that she needed. They need one final push against the creature, and she could only think of one thing capable of it–her Heavenly Strike.
She studied the large chamber, noticing the distance, the waves of air pressure hitting her, along with the roughhousing of the other fighters. One mishap was enough to kill her, and this time Zeke was out of the count. But that didn’t mean she was alone.
It was time for her training from earlier to be put to use. Her Lightning Mastery, a new skill she had acquired just a while ago, flared along with her attunement. Her Mana Perception went haywire as she tried to ignore the massive outpour of the enemy’s mana just swallowing her whole.
She extended her hand out as soon as the giant axe was about to be swung right at her, and electricity formed and lashed out at a pillar nearby. She let the electricity pull, but she didn’t plan on pulling the piller–she wanted to pull herself.
Her body lunged forward without her control, letting itself get taken by the lightning as the axe missed her by a wide margin. Still, the air pressure bashed at her, tossing her over and making her lose her grip on the lightning’s control. But that didn’t stop her even as she was in mid-air.
Her hand thrusted out and lightning formed once again, connecting her back to the pillar and pulling her by gyrating around the pillar. She didn’t expect that the lightning actually swerved along with her, making it easy for her to spin around and disconnect from the pillar, flying straight towards another pillar.
She didn’t really have an image in her head, at least not fully. She only thought about magnets when she thought about her lightning and what she can do outside of shocking herself. And rather than towards metal, she wanted to stick herself to anything else and use her lightning as a sort of leverage. It was actually a lot harder to imagine, as though the world was trying to reject her idea, but her lightning, as the name suggested, was very aggressive in getting what it wanted.
She could head straight for the boss, but that would be suicidal as it was constantly bashing against the other fighters. Myra noticed her coming, and when the boss was ready to lash out with its water blades, Myra poured all her effort to drown the axeblade in flames.
Fire hit the metal, causing the water to vaporize quicker before it could fully manifest, causing the swing to release droplets instead. The power was still there, however, causing one of the pillars that Mikella just left for another one to get hit. Surprisingly, that didn’t cause the pillar to break.
That made the boss stumble, along with the extra hits caused by Val, but that made the boss lose its focus as Zacharia roared again and slammed his giant blade straight at its ankle.
Blood spurted and bone cracked from the intense strike, causing even Mikella to wince and grimace–but she grinned after seeing the boss falling to its knee from the blow.
This was her chance. She lashed out another lightning whip, then flung as hard as she could, willing her fulmination to launch her straight at the boss, mostly at its back and straight below its neck.
In that instant, she focused on her core. All of her skills worked in tandem, and her energies formed around the blade as she committed herself into her Sword Art, focused entirely to sharpen its edge. There, she poured her Unbridled Fulmination, the same way Piker did with his frost layered kinetic blade, calling upon her Heavenly Strike.
The last time, she tried to implement her Heavenly Strike into several different weapons at once. She knew it would dilute its power, but the fact that it worked meant that she could tweak it into something better. This time, she tempered the skill, causing it to taper towards the very tip of her sword. Rather than extending it throughout the blade, by merely focusing on the point, the Heavenly Strike became fiercer, stronger, and more precise.
She combined both Lightning Strike and Heavenly Strike together to make one powerful shot, something that she hasn’t tried before. Her skills intermingled together in a cacophony of chaos and destruction.
It was also extremely hungry for resources, but her sword tip glowed at such an intensity that it made the entire chamber dim from its brightness. She roared, becoming a torpedo of sharp light that pierced directly at its back, at the base of its neck.
Blood flowed and a pained wail ensued. The boss raised its head high and roared, the air pressure increasing drastically to the point of making Mikella gnash her teeth together so hard, blood spilled from her cracked teeth.
But she still held firm to her sword. It still gouged at the neck, the blade piercing through the muscle and bone and flesh. She kept pouring more of her energy, uncaring about the wounds slowly covering her body. She needed to pour more damage, more wounds.
For a moment, Mikella dreaded that it wasn’t enough, her fear that she would die first before the boss could. As that small dread spread through her chest, a light formed beneath her as she looked down. Val’s body was glowing with deep greenish energy, which could only be described as an intense aura of kinetic force.
She roared, worse than even the boss as she launched like a cannonball straight at the boss, aiming right at its chest. Her own sword lodged deep into it, finally causing the boss to stay still. For that moment alone, everything turned silent, a singular air quake echoing across the chamber.
Soon everything became stilted as the boss was toppling over. Val already released herself but Mikella had a hard time pulling out the sword. It won’t go back into her storage pack if it’s still lodged into the creature so she just left it as she jumped high into the air.
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
But something else occured, something out of her expectations. The damn boss was beginning to glow a bright source of bluish light, covering its entire body. There was a strong scent of rivers and waterfalls coming off in waves, to which Mikella could hazard a guess and frowned.
“You gotta be fucking kidding me!”
The boss was about to explode. Again. She wasn’t sure why, but this creature had so many fail-safes it made facing an entire army look easy. She was still in the air, and her body was utterly devoid of energy–she couldn’t do anything.
But her body was quickly stopped by a sudden wall of magical light that stopped her flying, hurting her just a bit. Then more walls of lights, actually barriers, formed underneath in an angle as she slid down them all like a slide.
She slid all the way to their side where she spotted Zeke with his hand stretched, his face riddled with blood and looking pale as before. He gritted his teeth in concentration as he helped Mikella reach their side. With Val flying straight towards them, Zeke conjured a barrier around them, with Zacharia’s stones behind that barrier and finally Piker’s frost shield just behind that.
The creature soon exploded in a torrent of water that was even more forceful than before. It hit the barrier, and Mikella could spot instantly that the barrier wasn’t as strong as Zeke could make it out to be. It cracked in a lot of places, causing it to shatter and break. The stones were next, but they were no better as they slowly broke apart.
The only last surviving shield was Piker’s. He roared in defiance, not allowing a single drop of that powerful water hitting his team. To her surprise, most of the water coming at them either turned into frost, or were bashed away from the force of the ice, but even then, it was still too much.
Piker’s skin became lacerated, each droplet almost sharp as knives. Their density was too much to be just normal water, but Piker held firm. Everyone else also focused, pouring in their resources through his back. Zeke wasn’t done yet and neither was Zacharia as they pulled out stones and barriers around them to avoid getting hit by the sides, the water torrent going along everywhere.
It happened quickly, Mikella knew, but it felt like hours passed as the damage increased further and further. More dread took over as all of her comrades, Piker especially, looked worse for wear.
But eventually, everything ceased. The torrent slowly dissipated as the water began to disappear from the chamber, as if drying up straight into the floors and walls.
The entire chamber was in complete silence, and the only thing left was the team, completely desolated and injured beyond reason, but still alive.
And the corpse of the Commander boss on the floor, completely dehydrated from causing so much water to appear.
“It’s… over?” Myra asked, dreading to think that there was more. Her, Cloud, and Mikella came out of the small huddle, but not only did Zeke and Piker fall to the ground, groaning in pain, even Zacharia fell to his knees, gasping for air.
“...Fuck…” Zacharia cursed, a rare occurrence. “I’m getting too old for this shit.”
“You and me both,” Cloud agreed, again, another rare occurrence. “But we’re done.
And as proof of that, Mikella received a notification to detail her victory as a massive swarm of system energy filled her body. It was such a thrill to her tired being that it made her shiver along with Myra and the others.
> You have defeated Drake Commander, Level 104.
>
> You have gained experience points.
…..
> Level up! You are now Level 50. You gain 2 free points (2 FP total).
>
> You have gained +3 STR from your class.
> You have gained +3 DEX from your class.
> You have gained +3 END from your class.
…..
> Class Skill Choice available upon reaching Level 50.
“You gotta be kidding me,” Mikella scoffed, uncaring the fact that she managed to survive.
Just one measly level after defeating a true-born Master Rank boss? It shouldn’t matter that she had more help from the Journeymen suffusely, she deserved way more levels than this.
Well, at least she got another skill choice coming up. It would be the last one before she could reach Journeymen, so she needed to make it count. There were also more notifications to read after that.
> Kinetic Manipulation Level Up! It is now Level 6.
>
> You have gained +1 DEX from your skill.
> You have gained +2 END from your skill.
…..
> Mana Perception Level Up! It is now Level 8.
>
> You have gained +2 INT from your skill.
> You have gained +2 SPI from your skill.
…..
> Sword Mastery Level Up! It is now Level 7.
>
> You have gained +2 STR from your skill.
> You have gained +4 DEX from your skill.
…..
> Lightning Mastery Level Up! It is now Level 4.
>
> You have gained +3 INT from your skill.
> You have gained +3 SPI from your skill.
…..
> Pain Resistance Level Up! It is now Level 10 (Maxed).
>
> You have gained +1 VIT from your skill.
> You have gained +1 END from your skill.
>
> Pain Resistance has been maxed. Bonuses are now applied:
>
> -Increased pain tolerance.
> -Increased body durability
> -Advancement available
…..
> Skill Advancement has commenced.
>
> Your skill Pain Resistance (Uncommon) has advanced into Pain Resistance (Rare).
>
> You gain points based on the advanced rarity:
>
> +9 VIT
>
> Your skill Pain Resistance has been reset to Level 1. You will still retain the stat bonuses you have acquired before the advancement.
…..
> Heavenly Strike Level Up! It is now Level 9.
>
> Decreased stamina and mana consumption.
> Increased damage.
She paused when she finished reading the notifications. She felt something was off. It was as if it… ran out of things to upgrade.
She was sure she pulled in all the stops, and while she wasn’t crazy enough to assume that her Acquired Skills, Acrobatics and Dragon Eyes, would’ve leveled up–she expected some other class skill would have leveled up. Instead, it just sort of… stopped.
Like something ran out of juice and it had no longer enough for the other skills to upgrade.
Did I… Did I somehow ran out of energy to level up my skills?
She had the qualifications to level up her skills, she had no doubts now. However, the system was actually unable to keep leveling up her skills, or at least upgrade them in some way. She understood that in some parts, the other skills required more focus during the battle, so those that were left out of the subconsciousness, though still active, didn’t receive the benefit.
Guess that means I got to focus on the skills while I’m leveling and I can’t expect to have every single skill upgrade like before.
That, or the system was tired of bombarding her with notifications. Somehow she thought that was completely ridiculous, and somehow understandable.
She wasn’t even all that upset about it. In the end, she instantly advanced her newly maxed Pain Resistance to Rare rarity, like Zeke. The fact that she maxed out a seemingly hard to level resistance skill was enough to appease her. And she can’t always expect to grow so rapidly without some sort of limiter. She had a feeling that something bad might happen if she kept growing the way she did, and her instincts were usually right in this case.
She knew there would be more rewards coming her way, but surprisingly no title came for her. Putting aside all those thoughts, she ran over to the downed Zeke who was just about to get up, his face bleary and pale white from the expense in mana.
He looked like he was about to freeze, not a single hint of redness in his skin color. But he stood taught like a champ and faced Mikella with a weakened grin.
Rather than talking, which it was totally possible that he really couldn’t, he showed her his own notification, though only one, showing that he indeed received a title of his own.
She didn’t even bother having to ask as Zeke just showed her his screen of what he received.
> Overachiever:
> You are not satisfied doing the bare minimum. Even defeating foes stronger than you is not enough to sate your greed for more.
>
> You have gained +2 STR from your title.
> You have gained +2 DEX from your title.
>
> Title Skill attained: Give me more.
Mikella now understood. The reason why she didn’t receive any titles is because she already claimed one–back when she fought against an Expert when she was an Apprentice, all on her own for that matter.
At first she thought it was due to facing a creature at a higher stage than you, but apparently that wasn’t it. The title is earned either by successfully defeating a tough boss that was of a higher stage than your own by yourself, or face a boss two stages higher than you in a party and win. That’s how she guessed Zeke gained this title, which despite how weak it was at this point, having that title skill would definitely be a boon while he was leveling up doing runecrafting.
“I see smiles!” Myra shouted, noticing their ecstatic faces with her own grin. “Whatchut got? Wait! Lemme guess–more maxed skills?”
“Oh come off it,” Mikella sneered. “We all know you got some skills maxed out too.”
Myra only looked at her with a frown for just a moment. Then she sheepishly grinned as she rubbed her neck awkwardly.
“Yeah… I do,” She had that kind of grin that made Mikella want to slap her, but at the same time wanted to hug her for her effort.
“Piker?” Mikella asked, and of course Piker responded with a nod.
He looked exhausted, almost the same as Zeke as he took the brunt of the Commander’s attack with his ice shield. Despite that, he practically radiated with glee from his improvements.
While the Experts were already gushing at their success, the Journeymen were left on their own, Cloud and Zacharia standing side by side before Zacharia bent his knees to sit.
“Zeke, how’re you feeling?” Mikella asked, her hand casually draping Zeke’s shoulder to give comfort. She knew it made him feel better even if he never mentions it. Probably because he’s too embarrassed as a man to reveal it or something silly like that.
“Like shit,” Zeke answered promptly. “But I’ll live. Piker?”
“Close, but I can still fight,” Piker winced slightly. “Well, barely.”
“You guys really had it hard,” Myra said, and she shook her head. “Zeke though, even though you’re supposed to be support, you look like you went toe to toe with the boss on your own.”
“It’s cuz he’s too stupid to act smart in that situation,” Mikella added dryly.
“Mikky, sometimes I think you really like to bully Zeke,” Myra said, actually sounding worried despite the rising grin.
“He likes it,” Mikella quipped.
“Can you just not right now?” Zeke said with a hopeless tone. “My head is killing me…”
“Right,” Mikella giggled, but then she quickly frowned as she realized something. “Hey, where’s Val?”
“She’s…” Cloud grimaced, looking over to where the corpse boss was.
Everyone turned to find that Val was in fact where the boss was already. She was on top of its chest, a good few feet above the ground, and using her sword to literally dig through the cavity beneath the chest she made.
It was a gruesome sight, like trying to do a surgery but the hole was big enough to enter through. And Val did exactly that, even using her own bare hands to rip apart the flesh and organs that stood in her way.
Just when someone was about to ask what she was doing, it was made apparent as Val roared in literal glee as she pulled out something from within.
A spherical object, clearly bloody and smothered with gore, but it had a strange shimmer beneath the crimson liquid. It was dark, almost purplish with a swirl of the two same colors mashing together from within. That alone caused the pressure to suddenly increase when it came out, getting everyone on guard. And when Val hoisted it up, she opened her newly elongated mouth wide… and ate it whole.