The pre-fight talk with Bianca was both personal and necessary. Zarian used the time wisely to decide on his alpha skill loadout before the verbal exchange ended. Because of the genuine threat posed by Bianca with good +5, he figured it was best to use his greatest stuff up front.
That included the Parasite Cloak +1, Spectral Spider Network +1, Straight Darkness +2, Grimoire of the Mad Voidling Exile, and Summon Wizard Hat +1.
Having Straight Darkness +2 in the alpha skill section might seem like overkill. But he was facing the most powerful version of Bianca he’d seen yet. It would be the height of stupidity to underestimate her.
That didn’t mean he would leave out the skills in his beta section.
In fact, he had something special in store for Bianca with one of his beta skills in mind. Other than that, he needed his chosen five in the alpha section for their stellar utility.
He would be in a world of hurt without them in top tier shape.
Under the bright twin suns with the scent of blood and smoke in the air, Bianca hit him with the classic flash at the start of their battle. Zarian knew that would happen. But she timed it perfectly – right when he finished saying ‘Give me your all!’ – and before he could cast Void Step.
However, she was a split-second too slow to follow up with a more serious attack. He strode through the void and came out of wrinkled air ahead of the retreating kobolds and far from the fort.
He figured he might as well kill two birds with one stone.
“Look! Look! It’s the bad magic one!” yelled a kobold.
“He’s blocking our way! Kill him!” yelled another kobold.
Zarian chuckled at what he heard. He couldn’t see the kobolds directly. His main eyes were severely burnt.
Granted, he didn’t need them.
He had his spectral spiders that he was tossing around in the area. He also had Basic Aura Manipulation, which was a rare trait for a reason.
It didn’t naturally lend him vision. Instead, he had to move his aura around actively to touch the surrounding aura. There were auras in all things, especially in those who leveled up and accrued stats, which grew their aura.
Through aura manipulation, he pushed his sensory horizons to the limit and felt out everything close by. He kept pushing to feel out the rushing kobolds who were pointing their weapons at him or casting ranged attacks filled with unique elements infused with their aura.
Para swatted aside javelins, elemental bolts, and arrows while Zarian focused deeper.
He used part of his Fractured Mind for seeing through aura manipulation alone. Another part of his Fractured Mind used his spectral spiders to observe a flurry of rushing lights blitzing through the retreating kobolds.
It was a slaughter.
When one of those little lights passed through a kobold, it burned them up instantly, leaving a crispy and ravaged corpse. Bianca’s Light Step +1 with good +5 was scary, especially against the weaker kobolds.
She looked like a horrific and heavenly weapon cast down to scour the world of nonbelievers and anyone associated with evil. And she was gunning for Zarian because her Shining Mark skill was on him.
No matter where he went, she would find him. Worse yet, her Shining Mark dimmed the effectiveness of his own darkness.
It was sometimes surprising how little utility skills could end up being detrimental. He had to remember that Bianca didn’t come naturally into being a powerhouse, either. She’d started her journey in the Infinita Star System as mainly a support type of adventurer.
Zarian, despite his troubles, couldn’t help but smile at that. He loved how far they could push utility types. He loved how far Bianca was pushing him to get creative and unleash some unusual powers and tricks.
“There was once a Quagmire Pit that swallowed many a soul,” Zarian chanted, bringing to life the folktales of the Grimoire of the Dread Mire Hell Gator. The spells came to exist one by one, following a combo-based string. “In that Quagmire Pit were invisible jaws that snapped apart flesh and bone with a Dread Mire Bite. But the predator wanted more and more and gave all who could hear a warning with its Dread Mire Bellow.”
Two Quagmire Pits formed and merged into one. They weren’t as large as they would be if the gator grimoire was in the alpha section. Regardless of that, he pushed the spells as hard as he could.
The unified pits swallowed up hundreds of kobolds. The surface trembled and splashed with kobolds trying to escape, their attempts mostly futile, especially when an enormous pair of invisible jaws snapped up.
Blood and gore geysered up and rained down in a sluicing crimson fall. So many died from that one spell that the remaining kobolds tripped and fell back while under the huge red deluge.
Then the blood-coated jaws snapped open and released an eruptive bellow. A solidified sonic wave smashed the nearest kobolds into a messy tumble and had them screaming in traumatic terror.
Even Bianca’s flurry of lights couldn’t deny the power of the bellow.
The sonic wave forced her back into her human form. She tumbled along with the kobolds, landing in puddles of blood and gore as the sky finished raining down limbs and viscera.
The mental trauma from listening to the bellow wouldn’t stick to Bianca while she had her uber goodness buff. That was okay. Zarian just wanted her to stop while he finished his combo.
“Now it’s time to leave the pit and reveal yourself!” Zarian shouted with conviction and maddened glee. “With this folktale, I summon the great infernal predator, Dread Mire Hell Gator!”
This version of the Dread Mire Hell Gator would come out smaller because of the beta debuff. But nobody would deny it could make an impact when it arrived with a volcanic showing.
The hell gator burst out of the pit while covered in oily hell flames that were red and yellow. It had six eyes that glowed with intense and malevolent fury. All its teeth in its massive jaws were huge, many times bigger than most men were tall. And it ran on six legs while over a thousand feet long from its snout to its tail.
Seeing such an immense and powerful creature had the remaining kobolds screaming, falling over each other, begging for mercy.
The hell gator showed them no mercy. The hell gator crashed down with a ground trembling quake, stomped over groups of kobolds like they were bugs, and charged forward with a rumbling sprint.
Its head twisted sideways while rushing down for an earth-scraping chomp on Bianca’s position. Its teeth slashed apart and punctured every kobold between the Dread Mire Hell Gator and the Light Princess.
Zarian held his breath as Bianca did the expected thing – she used her Light Step +1 again. She dove into the flaming hell gator’s throat to avoid its massive bite.
Zarian sensed the hell gator facing some difficulty. Bianca was going on a rampage inside its body.
But unlike the wolf dragon, the hell gator was an infernal entity. Its body was filled with scorching flames and boiling blood. Bianca was going to have a hard time while inside of there.
Still, the hell gator thrashed about in pain, feet stomping, giant tail slamming, jaws snapping. The earth shuddered and rolled with impacts from the hell gator’s thrashing. More kobolds died in the wake of the hell gator. Bianca kept tearing the thousand-foot long monstrosity from the inside while enduring the hellish heat roiling furiously around her.
Stolen novel; please report.
“That should occupy her for some time, Para,” Zarian said. “And she doesn’t have too much aura left, even with her good +5. Once we wear her down enough, we can finish her.”
Para didn’t respond. She wasn’t eager to fight Bianca. The cloak flapped with less dramatic flair than usual.
Zarian chuckled while beams of deadly light punctured the hell gator from the inside out. Bianca was putting up an incredible fight. Still, Zarian had enough time to fit in a conversation and some more preparations.
“Think of it like this, Para,” Zarian said. “If we’re really Bianca’s friends, we’ll fight back until she can’t fight anymore. Then … we’ll make a change somehow. We will not lose our friend.”
Para perked up a little more after hearing that. Bianca was the first person other than Zarian to acknowledge the Parasite Cloak as a person.
Maybe it was strange for a parasitic, flesh-eating entity to care, but it was also strange for that entity to learn Spanish and befriend others. Para cared about Bianca and would fight to save a friend.
With Para onboard, Zarian turned his focus to his own dark powers, Dark Affinity especially. He was in a race against time as the Dread Mire Hell Gator lost some of its aggressiveness and slowed down heavily.
The creature vomited out boiling blood from its massive jaws. Parts of its body turned to stone and cracked in many places, like heavy stone falling off a mountain side.
Then the monstrous and fierce entity, Zarian’s biggest summon to date, craned back and let out a painful bellow before a massive blast of light erupted from inside of its chest.
Bianca demolished the hell gator. She flew free from its body and left the dead hell gator in crumbled piles of brimstone and sulfur.
Bianca landed nearby with a stumble. Her body was burnt in many places, but she was no stranger to pain. Her elven dress was still holding together despite some severe damage.
The Light Princess looked up with a scowl, searing light beaming from her eyes. In both hands, she held twin sabers of bright light. Orbs of light swirled around her, each packed with great smiting power, all enhanced by good +5.
Zarian snapped his fingers and used his Raise Advancing Skeletons spell. A hundred skeletons rose from the mud and blood, from the flesh and gore. They raked their bare skeletal fingers toward Bianca’s body like a scene out of a horror movie.
The Light Princess didn’t respond until the last second. Then she became a blurring figure of sweeping light and searing lasers. She eradicated the skeletons as easily as one could breathe.
Even after suffering through the bowels of the hell gator, Bianca kept exuding exceptional combat prowess. She showed an immense power that scoured the battlefield of skeletons and the still-living kobolds caught in the wake between two mortal titans of light and dark.
Zarian observed her through his aura manipulation and the distant spectral spiders watching from various angles. He would soon have to rely more on the former than the latter, as Bianca drew closer and closer.
She cleared through most of his rushed summons, the basic skeletons barely slowing her down.
That was fine. Zarian had all he needed now. The real preparations were complete.
“Let’s go, Para.”
“Let’s go!” Para roared while reshaped into their latest fighting suit.
She had Zarian covered in bone-like armor, with threads of flesh fused between the gaps. She turned the cloak behind his back into two big bestial arms that ended in thick fists with bone-plated knuckles. Zarian had similar knuckle-plates on the bone gauntlets made from Para’s body.
His wizard hat had shifted and fused with the carapace-like armor to further cover his head. He had the look of a big, heavy, juggernaut wizard now.
Of course, that wasn’t enough to stop this current version of Bianca. This was just the under armor to the deep and dense concentration of darkness Zarian had placed over each part of himself and Para.
This was how Dark Affinity and some creative use of Straight Darkness +2 came into play as he worked in and reinforced lines and plates of the armor with intensely dense darkness.
Then, as the finishing piece, Zarian cast the last spell he’d learned from the Grimoire of the Mad Voidling Exile, which was in his alpha skill section for this very reason: Void Layer.
Void Layer combined with Dark Affinity, Straight Darkness +2, and the armored version of his Parasite Cloak +1 was a cheat power combination.
He had the best of many worlds like this. The density of his darkness held weight while the emptiness of the void made his darkness more absorbent against offensive elements. The parasite armor and big knuckles were heavier and able to hold up under the power of the void and darkness.
Better yet, because of his Void Mysticism trait, he didn’t need a high amount of points in Wonder to scale with Void Layer. His Void Mysticism trait made it so his enormous points in Mysticism would grant partial scaling to all void-based abilities, intensifying this power even further
Just like that, Zarian flipped his weakness against light-based powers into one where he held the greatest advantage. Now he and Para looked like a black hole shaped into an armored juggernaut with four arms.
All light. All reality. Everything swirled around the edges of this form. As if the fundamental elements of the world were draining into his all-consuming, void-layered darkness, where there was no escape.
The Shining Mark skill stopped being a factor.
Zarian laughed.
Bianca hit him with a giant smiting beam of light and goodness. Zarian got to feel how stupidly busted the good alignment could be. Despite all of his preparations, Bianca’s power rose to a point of nearly matching him.
But it wasn’t enough to eradicate him or overcome his ultimate defense. Zarian and Para stood their ground and absorbed her massive attack while the surrounding landscape was vaporized.
The ground turned into melted slag. Fires blazed uncontrollably. Smoke stacked into the sky. The remaining kobolds who were nearby turned to ash. Then the attack ended, and Zarian remained standing and unharmed.
Zarian rushed forward with four arms raised. Bianca let out a wrathful scream and rushed forward as well.
With a step and twist, Zarian used a burst of darkness from under his feet to scoot to the side and move out of the way of a powerful sword swing Bianca struck down from overhead.
He landed heavily and pressed into Bianca’s flank. He took another sword swing to the chest and felt it challenge his control over the void-layered darkness.
The armor held out.
Bianca’s attack slid off and left no damage. All light and heat disappeared into the void armor.
Undaunted, Bianca entered a frenzy. She slashed at him with the utmost of speed and tenacity. Her light shone with an intensity that drowned out the light from the suns.
Zarian and Para remained as a spot of unyielding darkness in all of the light. Nothing could break through. She couldn’t wipe them away with her all-destroying light.
The duo rushed at her, and for the first time since this started, they forced Bianca to truly back up. She retreated while she kept slashing at them with a flurry of attacks.
Nothing could cut through the void-layered darkness and reach the flesh underneath. But each slash kept challenging Zarian’s control and his aura supply.
The time was ticking.
Zarian and Para threw haymaker punches that swung through the air with heavy whomps. Bianca swerved around each of their four-armed attacks and returned more slashes in between the punches.
She even threw in short-range solar flares, mini sun bombs, and mini-lasers from different angles. She became more creative under the pressure, unwilling to buckle.
The most interesting trick Zarian observed was when she called in clones of herself that attacked with hard light swords. He hadn’t realized that was a possibility. He stumbled a little when he felt Bianca’s illusions strike him with cuts and stabs that would’ve been deadly against anyone else.
Zarian adapted fast. He thrust his hands into each illusion and absorbed them into the void. As long as they weren’t real, his void-layered darkness was the ultimate end of Bianca’s illusions.
At some point, Zarian wondered how long this would last. Then, to his relief, Bianca really started to fade. He felt it through his aura manipulation.
Bianca had an enormous amount of power, and her supercharged good alignment might’ve fed into her aura supply somewhat, but she couldn’t escape from her fundamental weakness fully.
She had always been an aura guzzler. She burned out fast. Especially against Zarian’s unyielding defense.
To be fair, he was using every ounce of power he could put into his darkness and void spell. He’d already burnt through so much aura he was getting dangerously close to being empty himself.
However, Zarian would be damned if he lost a war of attrition against Bianca. Now it was time to remind her why she called him daddy.
The Madness Wizard hit Bianca with a heavy gut punch and broke a few ribs. Para grabbed Bianca by the leg and raised her up before slamming her down into the ground hard, forming a big crater.
Bianca turned into a flurry of lights to escape, but that was a sign of weakness to Zarian. In which case, he was the dominant figure.
That was plenty of grounds for using his Lore Eater trait liberally. He consumed some of Bianca’s surface memories and raced her to the spot where she would naturally reform.
She wouldn’t even know he was doing that. He used Lore Eater to consume her most recent observations to keep her blinded to his next move.
After she reformed, her eyes opened wide in surprise when she found Zarian already in front of her.
He struck her face with a backhanded slap that knocked her off her feet. Para’s giant mitt for a hand reached out and caught Bianca by the back of her head.
Bianca screamed in frustration and do-gooder defiance.
Para slammed Bianca’s face into the ground and shut her up. Then, before Bianca could recompose herself, Para raised her up and slammed her face down again and again until the Light Princess stopped resisting.
She fell unconscious.
Zarian was victorious.