The amount of concentration it took to fire one powerful dark beam while charging up a second in secret was so enormous, Zarian overworked his aura channels, making his brain feel like it was unraveling. It didn’t help that he had two handicaps, the aura cuffs and his Straight Darkness +1 in the beta skill section.

He still had the glorious view of the monk’s eyes widening in surprise before getting struck down from the air. The beam smashed monk into the earth with a ground shaking thump and kept pummeling him until Zarian needed to let up just to breathe a strangled breath.

Battered but useable, his Parasite Cloak formed into a parachute that gently set him down on the ground.

Zarian gasped and sputtered, his torso a volcano of erupting pain. He could barely stand, his legs wobbly.

He fought through the pain. He clenched his jaw, grinning and bearing it. He focused his vision on his grimoire and did some quick reading.

Meanwhile, Para dropped off the goblin skeletons from the cloak. Zarian raised them up from piles of bones to their held-together necromancy forms. He also summoned a hundred spectral spiders.

“You dare read in the middle of a battle, spell caster!” roared the monk, beat up, but alive. The vitality he had must be ridiculously high. “Your books won’t save you! I will snap your limbs! I will rip out your heart! I will honor the dead and pray in tribute to Evil God Killall, the best god!”

Zarian kept reading while coughing up blood. His skeletons and spectral spiders ran boldly at the Force Monk.

Nobody could land a hit or a bite on him. He punched out shockwaves of force that scattered the skeletons and obliterated the spiders.

Loner remained mostly upright by rolling out of the way. A few spectral spiders held on tightly to the inside of his ribcage for dear life. The other skeletons tried to reassemble themselves when they fell to the monk’s attacks, but the gnoll caught on.

He sent more shockwaves at the bone piles and smashed the fallen goblin skeletons into ivory splinters.

Loner remained the last skeleton standing.

Zarian sighed with a raspy voice and slammed his grimoire shut with a thought. The spectral chains rattled once before the grimoire phased back into his body in a ghostly manner.

“Sorry, I should’ve been better prepared,” Zarian said, blood leaking from the corner of his mouth. “Your friends shouldn’t have perished like that, Loner.”

The lone goblin skeleton shrugged. He glanced back at Zarian, gave him a nod, and stepped from between the wizard and the monk.

The gnoll monk growled. “When you die, I will report to the tribe. Then we will attack the Eternal Garden Kingdom without mercy. All of your men will be eaten, your children made into toys, and your women defiled. Evil God Killall will watch proudly from on his throne of death!”

Zarian raised his cuffed arms. Threads from the Parasite Cloak reached into the keyhole in the middle of the heavy restraints. Para fussed around with the lock mechanism, and, with a heavy clunk, freed him.

He sighed with relief. He regained his usual power on top of having the Overpowered trait. His aura shot up considerably.

“Good game,” Zarian said, before hurling denser javelins faster and harder than ever before.

The monk’s eyes widened in surprise, dodging instead of deflecting. The sheer force of the javelins passing nearly yanked him off balanced, the air rippling in the wake of the powerful projectiles.

The gnoll barely flipped backwards in time before sharp spikes thrust up from the deep shadows on the floor. He landed on top of a large stone block lit under the three-moon night, palm cocked back before thrusting forward to shoot a powerful force torrent.

Zarian’s newest dark beam smashed into the force torrent. He pumped more power, more force, more density into his dark beam and crushed the monk’s force torrent.

Again, the monk’s eyes shot wide with surprise before flipping out of the way of Zarian’s attack. The monk kicked his legs behind him, releasing a force blast from his feet. He careened forward like a ball out of a cannon and flipped into another powerful flying kick.

A dense, dark pillar rose from the ground and blocked the monk’s kick with a resounding crack and thump. Most of the pillar dissolved away, but some of it remained, with Zarian standing unharmed behind the crumbling pillar.

The monk looked on with his hyena-like mouth agape, gobsmacked by the incredible display of magical prowess. He reacted too slowly when a fast and needle-thin spike of darkness attacked from behind. The thin spike pierced his back shoulder and ran halfway through.

The gnoll howled angrily, arm raised, then he split the dark spike with a forceful hand chop. Doing so was costly for the monk because he was distracted.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

“Black Fire.” Zarian gave life to his new spell while the monk’s attention had diverted away.

Hand extended, black and gray embers bloomed into existence from Zarian’s palm before erupting into a furious but quiet gout that rushed forth to consume the monk in his entirety.

While his attention had diverted to the spike, the monk hadn’t remained inattentive for long. He replied to the Black Fire spell with a desperate kick of force, swiping it away and forcing the wizard to respond.

Zarian hunkered down inside a suit made from his Parasite Cloak while bound to the field by stakes of bone.

Para lost more of her material, suffering to defend her master, and Zarian felt the shockwave pass through him even when Para soaked most of it up. Sharp, burning pain from his broken ribs reminded him he didn’t have long. The pain nearly sent him down to his knees.

Barely able to stay upright, Zarian pushed past the pain as Para peeled off of him. He shot a new attack: a dark beam wreathed in Black Fire.

The monk didn’t have any adequate defenses while caught in an awkward position after throwing that desperate kick. The black-flamed dark beam struck home and crushed the monk into the stone-littered ground.

The black-flamed dark beam pushed the monk through block after block until he crashed into one that was too hard for both the monk and the wizard to move.

Zarian poured more darkness and black flames on the monk, holding nothing back. He crushed the monk against the immovable stone block with an unrelenting force that pulped flesh, broke bone, and burned away vitality at an increasing rate.

Hurry, Zarian thought hazily as he kept exhausting his aura with the heavy dark beam and Black Fire.

Hurry up and die. Blood was pouring out of his mouth as waves of nauseating pain struck him again and again from his busted torso.

Hurry up and fucking die! Zarian took his rage and poured even more aura into his attack. The dark beam and Black Fire grew even larger, more wrathful, more damaging, hitting with a roar that resonated far and scared all the local beasts and shook up the nearest stone trees like they were suffering from a relentless storm.

The huge, immovable stone block shattered, pulverized under the epic power of the Black Wizard Apprentice.

A deluge of gold notifications appeared, starting with the one Zarian wanted to see the most, his magic output winding down. After that, he went through all the gold boxes.

Caught up on notifications, Zarian cut off his overwhelming beam fully. The black flames sputtered out without vitality to feast on. The silence was loud until he realized the meaning behind the first notification and the defeat of the Gnoll Force Monk.

“Bastard,” Zarian groaned. “You weren’t Level 41, you were Level 47. What was the point of lying about that? To make me think I have a fighting chance instead of running?”

I would’ve switched Straight Darkness from beta to alpha if I had known.

He should’ve done that before entering the battle grounds. He should’ve hurried up with Black Fire before this fight. Now Loner was the last goblin skeleton, and he’d only gained one level from this.

Yeah, fuck me, I got too cocky. Now my ribs are broken. They hurt so much I’m ready to black out.

He wasn’t in the mind frame to appreciate the other notifications. Not at this moment, at least.

Zarian nearly fell over, but something stopped him. When he looked down at himself, he noticed little threads piercing his body.

Para was running more threads through him now, wrapping him up from the outside going in.

The sensation wasn’t painful, but he was highly aware of her spreading everywhere, like a parasitic root system. Then his own pain lessened considerably.

“Para, what did you get for your advancement?” Zarian brought up the upgraded skill.

Zarian beamed with a bloody grin before feeling parasitic threads invading up his neck and down his limbs. The threads crawled all over, showing under his skin like tree roots under soil.

The parasitic threads even wormed in and out of his eyelids and over the surface of his eyeballs. They reached every part of his flesh, even his scalp.

Once they covered him thoroughly from the inside, the threads concealed themselves, merging with him seamlessly at the obvious places, but not everywhere. If someone looked closely, they might see parasitic threads worming under the skin of his neck.

Zarian … felt greater. More whole. But there was a burning, insatiable, almost torturous hole inside of him. It howled from within him, feverishly so.

The hole needed to be filled with something tasty. It needed a lot of tasty things to fill it, or Zarian would suffer.

“WE are HUNGRY!” growled Zarian, voicing his and Para’s appetite.

He let the cloak eat her fill of the gnoll monk’s crushed remains. Once satisfied, the hunger abated, but not by much. He needed food for himself, which led Zarian to staggering back the way he came to regroup with the others.

They better give up as many rations as possible. Or Zarian would tear through the fortified forest like a ravenous wolf, breaking all the rules and providing all the disrespect to the Good Gods.

Purgehunt, Kingsblood, whoever the fuck, they could all suck it! The hunger was no joke!

Where was Foodie when he needed her cooking?