Aurelian closed the distance between himself and the Behemoth with a surge of System-assisted speed, leaning into his agility and dexterity attributes as much as he could in a way that he couldn’t quite explain. It wasn’t that he changed how the attributes worked, per se, as much as he just consciously pushed them to their limits in conjunction with his Running skill.
The overlaid mana-active mode of Dragon’s Gaze combined with his normal sight was slightly disorienting at speed while he closed with the gigantic Skarnid, but Aurelian did his best to ignore it and trust his intelligence-enhanced mind to process the information properly. It was an invaluable asset, insofar as understanding how the creature’s internal and magical processes worked.
He could actually see the mana coalescing and forming within it every time it took the chance to spit corrosive goop up at Bahamut between engagements with Karsys’ tower shield.
The moment he closed with the Behemoth, Aurelian threw himself forward and under its skittering legs while it was distracted with Karsys, lifting his crest and taking only a few moments to track the myriad flows of corrupted mana within the creature’s body before aligning his blade for a strike.
Trusting his instinct as much as the information given to him by Dragon’s Gaze, Aurelian thrust his weapon upward and pierced clean past the soft underarmour of the Skarnid’s underbelly. He ignored the desire to vomit that came the moment he was splashed by viscous, black-green blood; and instead sawed at the creature’s body while listening to it wail and screech upon realising what was happening.
Its attention at that point was firmly distracted from Karsys and Bahamut both, and as hoped both the human and the dragon capitalised on its sudden lapse in focus. Karsys stepped forward and, with little hesitation, started aggressively assaulting the Skarnid’s limbs with chitin-cracking blows from his flanged runemace, while Bahamut rained down flames in a torrent of blistering power from above.
Aurelian tore his blade sideways, then forward, slashing and mutilating with every fibre of his enhanced strength while lacerated organs and guts dropped from within the foetid creature’s gaping wound like so much refuse. He had to move carefully to continue his assault, eyes peeled for the stabbing legs and erratic, panicked movements of the behemoth while it tried to find a way to attack the unknown presence murdering it from below.
With the behemoth’s flowing mana channels disrupted by the magical assaults native to his Crest’s nature and his companions duly assaulting it with bow, mace, and flame; Aurelian chose that moment to attempt to use his Anima Syphon ability on the wounded creature. He tore his crest-blade free and without pausing to think too much about it, focused on trying to grasp the life force of the beast above him.
No System response answered his attempts, but a natural kind of intuition pinged through his mind immediately. First and foremost he instantly understood that Anima Syphon had failed, and thereafter, he also immediately comprehended that it had failed because the Behemoth was still both too healthy and too powerful for him to effectively syphon it.
All these things happened within the speed of thought.
Enlightened to the limitations of his power, Aurelian decided to opt for discretion over borderline suicidal recklessness and immediately turned to run and dive out between the panicked creature’s legs, and harness the moment to roll to his feet a short distance away.
The Skarnid squealed in agony and rage when Aurelian appeared and, seemingly realising him to be the source of its pain, lashed out with its massive stinger. Booms of the creature’s monstrous tail smashing into the earth echoed into the air, and Aurelian danced and dodged away in order to rapidly gain some distance while Karsys bellowed another Taunt and—just barely—managed to re-orient the creature’s hatred toward him.
“It’s too strong for me to use my new abilities on it!” Aurelian shouted while lifting his right hand, holding his sword ready in his left, and firing off an ozone-burning Lightning Bolt at the Skarnid Behemoth with a crackle-pop and boom of associated thunder.
The creature screeched in furious pain at the impact, and both Chitin and soft flesh exploded from the impact.
“What’s the plan, then?!” Karsys yelled back while dancing around the Skarnid’s furious assault.
A quick Revelate told Aurelian the creature was down to less than half of its health, close to the one-third mark, and he grunted. That meant they’d need to kill it.
“Kill the thing, and I’ll try them on the corpse!”
An arrow sailed overhead a moment later as if to give action to his words, and a sudden cssk-BOOM of discharging lightning detonated one of the Skarnid’s many eyes.
Aurelian dodged backward instinctively from the reeling creature when it scuttled backwards almost drunkenly with Karsys in pursuit, and turned to find Zylara readying a second arrow with cold focus.
“Elves and arrows…” Aurelian murmured to himself with a surge of amusement while turning back to face the massive Skarnid Behemoth. The moment he did, his Dragon’s Gaze snapped passively to the fore of his awareness.
He didn’t even have time to call out a warning.
Corrupted mana welled within the monster, and infused its vocal chords.
A skull-rattling shriek erupted from the Skarnid’s maw a heartbeat later with enough force that Aurelian’s vision momentarily doubled and he felt his equilibrium fail him.
The clang of his armored knee impacting the ruined city streets sent a jolt through his body and mind, and Aurelian winced against the secondary psychic backlash of the behemoth’s cry, and the surprising damage to his enhanced eardrums.
When he returned his attention to the creature, he found it aglow with power.
Some sort of last-ditch berserker capacity, most likely.
The sound of distant shrieking hit his ears, and as if to make bad news worse; Bahamut’s voice echoed into his mind at the same moment.
The foul creature has summoned reinforcements! Hasten its demise!
“It called for help!” Arthur shouted despite the partial deafness from the Skarnid’s roar. “We have to end this fast!”
“Ready whenever—” Karsys fell silent momentarily while he tanked a stinger-stab to his shield with a resounding boom “—you are!”
Aurelian laughed despite himself and threw himself forward toward the hulking foe with a single-minded focus. He knew more Skarnids were coming. He could almost sense and see them simultaneously with Dragon’s Gaze, but he couldn’t afford to be distracted. He had to deal with the threat before him, and concern himself with the remainder afterward.
A near dodge around a flailing, stabbing limb carried Aurelian into close quarters with the rampaging beast, and he set to work with a butcher’s efficiency.
His runesword rose and fell with cold purpose, and the Skarnid bellowed in hatred as another limb was sent careening away by the magical blade’s assault. Once again in proximity to the creature, Aurelian felt its corruption like an oil-slick on his skin—foetid and repulsive to equal degree, and rife with the corrosive damage that had been wrought upon the once-paradisiacal lands of the Elysean Empire.
Karsys’ shield hummed with power for a moment as they fought, and the tall warrior smashed it forward into the Skarnid’s wounded face with another raging battlecry.
When he did, the Behemoth staggered backward in stunned surprise.
Aurelian took the presented opportunity without hesitation.
His sword arced up and cut across with lethal precision, and he felt himself harmonize with the blade at the exact moment it cleaved clean through the Skarnid’s remaining legs on its left side.
The beast collapsed in a writhing, spasming heap while lashing out with its tail in every conceivable direction. Aurelian barely had time to raise his crest before one such wild swing smashed into him like a sledgehammer, and sent him careening across the ground away from Karsys and the monster both.
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Directly, so it happened, into the path of the beast’s approaching reinforcements.
He barely managed to recover some sense of situational awareness before the vanguard of the incoming beasts crashed atop him. Aurelian’s aching and clearly damaged body managed to eke out a moment of adrenaline-and-desperation fuelled response, and he half-rolled, half-scrambled away from a descending stinger to stumble to his feet and re-orient to face the approaching Skarnids.
Revelate activated almost instinctively.
Name: Corrupted Skarnid
Race: Blight Arachnid
Level: 33
Tier: Aspirant
Health: 1766 / 1766
Description: Skarnids are twisted predators that thrive in the Desolation, and stalk its corrupted lands for prey with which to sate their consuming hunger. This Skarnid’s already vile form has been further corrupted by foul uses of twisted Life and Nature mana, creating a foetid abomination.
“Oh. Fucking wonderful.” Aurelian cursed upon absorbing the information on the new arrivals. More regular Skarnids. Not even some sort of easier, less powerful Swarmer variant or something else one might expect for a ‘boss’ fight. Just a bunch of very angry, very lethal horse-sized scorpion spiders with a very bad attitude.
Bahamut’s thunderous roar overhead rolled across the area, and for a blessed moment the horde of Skarnids hesitated.
“Aurelian?!” Karsys shouted.
“Handle the big one!” Aurelian yelled back. “I’ve got this!”
Karsys’ only reply was another roaring Taunt at the crippled Behemoth.
From the rear, Zylara punched another lightning arrow into the wounded monster.
“We’ll help as soon as we can!” she called out in promise.
“Right.” Aurelian muttered while the Skarnids chittered angrily, and seemingly decided that the Dragon’s presence was not enough to dissuade them from the ‘metal-wrapped snack’ that was Aurelian. “Time to test out the new tricks.”
Dragon’s Sanguination came to life with a flicker of will.
The Skarnids chose that moment to charge.
Dragon’s Resolve washed away his momentary panic.
Aurelian met their charge with an explosion of violence.
His crest rose and fell and took the first Skarnid’s monstrous skull with it, eviscerating the chitin and flesh and sending the headless corpse spasming to the ground. Before its legs had even finished reactively curling in on themselves to signify its death, Aurelian was onto the next creature.
While he did, he instinctively activated Anima Harvest.
Motes of red energy exploded from the Skarnid’s corpse, and slammed into him.
The second they did, his awareness flashed with an update.
You have gained 2 Anima!
His runesword sung as it cleaved through the air, and in the same moment as three stingers smashed into his plate—Aurelian claimed another Skarnid life. Anima Syphon triggered once more even while vitality and health surged through his body, restoring his physical self almost as quickly as the Skarnids—which failed to penetrate his armour—delivered blunt-force trauma to various parts of his enhanced physiology.
Each time he was hit, Dragon’s Sanguination built—and aetheric bolts of cardinal lightning lanced out around him as a result of its Tempering attribute. Kinetic energy built, and Aurelian threw himself more wholly into the fight.
You have gained 2 Anima!
The tempering he’d undergone proved itself up to the challenge while he fought, and Aurelian felt his sanguine core roaring with mana and vitality as he slashed and hacked his way into the dense mass of Skarnid bodies.
Chaos surrounded him in a tide, and Aurelian lost all sense of anything that wasn’t the Skarnids highlighted by Dragon’s Gaze, and the insanity of his fight to stay alive. Anima was syphoned wherever possible, and still, still Dragon’s Sanguination built its kinetic cache.
Aurelian spun abruptly after harvesting yet another Skarnid, and deflected the vine-like whip of a lashing tail in the midst of the conflict; smashing aside the stinger with the flat of his blade and extending his hand.
Mana surged around his fingers while rage built in his core, steadily buoyed by revulsion, and then aetheric force ignited around his palm with crackles of Force magic.
“Fuck you.” he spat with contempt.
The creature’s head imploded in an outward eruption of corrupted grey matter.
You have gained 2 Anima!
Arthur checked his mental list, and noted that two things had changed.
First, he had accrued close to thirty Anima.
Second, an awareness of Dragon’s Sanguination sung at him.
The [Monarch’s Bloodstorm] infusion cried out to be unfettered.
With a single flex of his will, Aurelian let it go.
The result was an unleashing of the condensed and accumulated kinetic pressure. The air around Aurelian warped and twisted, and sound momentarily vanished in the same instant as a pressure bubble manifested and then popped in the same heartbeat. A roar of concussive power discharged from his body, and bolts of destruction as red as blood exploded outward in a rippling dome of red lightning two meters wide.
The Skarnids in range were not burnt, they simply exploded.
Pure kinetic force impacted the creatures’ chitinous shells and they detonated with the force of fragmentation grenades, pushing away and wounding the other creatures around them—and drenching everything in black and green blood, shattered chitin, and globules of decimated flesh that he’d long-since stopped noticing.
Aurelian took a moment after using the built-up kinetic force to brace his runesword against the blood-and-guts lathered ground, and took in a steadying breath.
“Well shit.” he muttered with a look around. “Thanks Gramps.”
Skarnids had been thrown all over the area by the detonation of their peers, and while Aurelian himself had received numerous cuts, lacerations, and impact-force wounds from the same eruptions—he hardly even noticed. His healing was already catching up, and he idly noticed that when it did, his Anima reserves drained steadily. A form of accelerated vampiric healing, then, in exchange for his accrued Anima.
Not a bad trade, overall.
His eyes went to some nearby Skarnid corpses, and a new idea popped into his mind. Aurelian moved quickly before the disarrayed Skarnids could recover and extended his left hand to the nearest in-tact corpse, some four meters away. The moment he did, an awareness of its anatomy—and the depth of its corruption—filled his mind like a blueprint. Without overthinking it, Aurelian willed his Anima reserves to fill the body, and occupy its nervous system.
At the same moment, he felt a tether erupt into being between himself and the deceased Skarnid, built from a force of magic he could only describe as inexplicable. It felt cold and hot at the same time, and seemed like it was anchored to his will. There was a weight of responsibility to it, though it lacked any kind of true physical expression of burden—and with it came a sudden jolt of understanding.
“Arise.” Aurelian commanded firmly, and with a flash of nerdy glee.
In the same instant, he sent his desires along the tether like a broadcast signal.
The Skarnid corpse rose like a weathered marionette to its feet. Each movement was jerky and robotic, like it were being manipulated by a drunken operator and was possessed of rusted joints and faulty gears. The raised corpse staggered for a moment, took two steps, and then promptly collapsed.
The tether disintegrated almost in the same instant, and Aurelian staggered when he felt a feeling of sudden backlash. His health, he noticed, also dropped by a small amount and he felt blood in his mouth—though he shuffled the knowledge of backlash away for later consideration.
“Note to self,” he muttered while spitting out blood, “avoid the big things until you know what the rules are.”
With that note made, he turned his mind instead to the result, and he focused Dragon’s Gaze on the creature’s once more inanimate corpse in the same moment as a moment of epiphany took hold of his consciousness: the Skarnid lacked a head. He had all but obliterated its brain during combat with his runesword.
Which meant that, like any body, Anima Infused Corpses required some manner of locomotive command to function properly. In other words, they needed an in-tact head and brain… though how in-tact was unknown.
“When in doubt, follow the rule of zombie.” he decided with a self-satisfied nod.
His eyes swept the recovering Skarnids, and he searched for corpses with heads.
An annoyed frown spread across his lips while he considered the bodies and realized he’d been a little too effective at dismembering and decapitating them. Of the ones he’d slain, which numbered well over a dozen; none of them were in-tact enough for him to be confident in using Anima Infusion again. Instead, he’d need more corpses—and to change up his fighting style to ensure they were in the right condition.
A screech of rage caught his attention, and Aurelian looked toward where the Skarnids had finally recovered—really, barely thirty seconds had passed—and were reconstituting their horde.
Instead of taking a defensive posture, Aurelian smiled darkly and levelled his runesword toward the thinned out swarm of corrupted arachnids.
They represented a whole sea of Anima and minions ripe for the reaping.
“Frostmourne hungers, you ugly sons of bitches.”
The Skarnids screeched shrilly in response and surged toward him.
Aurelian threw himself forward to meet their charge with a cackle.