Health : 80 980 / 80 980
Stamina : 21 047 / 21 047
Mana : 203 650 / 417 100
Sofia looked at her mana trickle down as she prepared a piercing bolt before entering. It’s really annoying that the runes lock all regeneration. As soon as I get stuck on VPPV the next goal is to fix that. Hopefully before the next trial.
Plasma kept growing and gathering over the Scepter, Sofia felt the heat on her face even through the bone armor helmet but her right arm was completely fresh, protected by the dragon scale arm. She turned to Astelia, “Ready when you are.”
The small Vampire nodded and closed the visor of her own helmet. She walked up to the door and extended her hand.
“Interestingly,” she said, “I have a lot more control over my specialization when I directly touch the target. Kind of like you with your bones.”
Like punched by a giant, the heavy-looking stone door broke off from its frame and was sent flying away into the huge boss’s room, it flew on a curved path, barely missing the giant tree in the middle to lodge itself into the opposite wall like a thrown dagger into a soft fruit.
“You missed,” Sofia commented.
“I’m the Oracle of Moon, not an expert of door ballistics.”
Barely able to hear each other’s banter through the crackling of the bolt’s raging plasma, they walked into the strangely peaceful room.
The boss room was akin to a giant cylinder, with narrow pathways all the way along the walls. It somewhat reminded Sofia of the abyss under Scripture’s Holy See. In the middle was a giant tree with dark red bark and black leaves that spanned from the bottom where they were all the way up to the ceiling, some fifty meters above. The diffuse red light coming from its three large veiny red fruits near the canopy lit up the room somewhat, quickly drowned by the intense light of the bolt Sofia was holding onto. The tree’s thick roots were all over the floor and amidst them were dozens of rusty and broken mechanical knights like the ‘Protector of Mezanthil’ the students had fought.
The only reason Astelia and Sofia had time to banter was because of the lack of immediate danger, but they became serious once they stepped into the room.
There’s mana coming from all the broken knights.
The black leaves of the tree rustled above.
Impaled by thick roots that spread in and around them, the armors stood up.
Astelia called to Sofia as she readied her mithril blades, “I get the knights you get the tree!”
Sofia did not need to be told twice. Before the knight could even fully stand up, she launched herself forward with a beat of her wings. March of the Envoy flipped to the Chaos state, and Sofia reached the trunk in two seconds, evading a few attacking roots on the way. The scepter hit the bark, and despite the intensity of the bolt, barely penetrated into it. The following solar burst was just as underwhelming, failing to scorch the bark, and as Sofia reared back to attack again, she could see the superficial wound she had inflicted to the tree close back up.
That’s a tough one.
Below her, Astelia was cutting up the mechanical knights. Like puppets on long roots, they could ‘fly’ and pursue the Vampire anywhere the living roots could reach. Astelia had tried cutting the roots but found them almost as resilient as the trunk, so she turned to cutting up the armors and their weapons instead, which was no easy task as there were many. Still, the mechanical knights used no magic so far, and Astelia had yet to get hit once.
Sofia glanced at her remaining mana and decided that the best course of action was to use no spell. Since she missed the damage output to hurt the tree, she would just keep hitting it while reinforcing her ‘weapon’. I can still make this bolt ten times stronger!
Relatively undisturbed, Sofia hit the trunk several times at the same spot, the scepter making it a bit deeper each time. This freedom was short-lived, as new knights on roots emerged from the chambers in the walls, bumping their numbers up from the few dozens Astelia had been killing one by one to more than a hundred in just a few breaths. Avoiding them wasn’t extremely hard, Sofia was very used to avoiding tentacles by now, even with a sword-wielding knight at the end, but it made keeping up the pressure against the trunk much harder. Every time she had to fly in a wide arc to avoid an attack, she could see the bark reforming.
The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.
Sofia stopped attacking the trunk, she maneuvered through the flying knight to rejoin Astelia.
“This isn’t working! Let’s kill the knights first!” she told Astelia.
Working in tandem with Sofia, Astelia could now switch to using her specialization to clump the knights together for Sofia to strike them, which worked a lot better. Whenever a mechanical knight was sufficiently damaged, the root propping it up would fall back to the ground. They quickly worked through the swarms of knights, taking a few hits each in the process. The more they disposed of, the easier it got, and eventually the tree had nothing else to throw at them. For a second after the last root fell, it almost felt like they had won, and it was about time, as Sofia’s bolt-enhanced weapon had almost completely drained her mana. Not wanting to hit zero quite yet, she finally threw the bolt at the trunk, piercing it from side to side.
“It’s not over,” Astelia commented, breathing heavily as she observed the red sap flowing out of the newly drilled bolt hole and running down the trunk.
“It’s never over until we get the kill notification,” Sofia confirmed, “The students are still safe,” she added after quickly checking up on Pareth’s vision.
Without warning, the three ogre-sized fruits of the tree fell. They hit the floor like boulders, crushing roots under them, and the red sap of the tree quickly started pooling in the small craters they had formed.
Sensing shenanigans, Sofia fell down, and stored the smaller of the three fruits. As it was no longer connected to the tree, nothing prevented her from snatching it. But the other two just wouldn’t fit in her storage, and were quickly filling up with mana as they absorbed the sap.
Under Astelia’s magic, the other two fruits flew back up, and once they were at her level, she kicked them. The gargantuan fruits exploded against the wall with a wet sound, spraying sap everywhere.
“Safe?” Sofia asked.
“No. I was too late.”
Something fell from the crushed fruits embedded in the wall, human-sized creatures brimming with mana.
“This seems dangerous,” Sofia told Astelia as they observed the creatures stand up like zombies, “Let’s go for my plan.”
“Got it.”
Astelia activated her [Lunar Realm], flooding the room in cold moonlight while she closed her eyes. This was her opportunity to rest, heal, and regenerate some mana and stamina.
Meanwhile, Sofia still kept her small reserve of just about thirty thousand mana and made her way back down to the ground level, walking on thin air in the direction of the two creatures. She switched her scepter with her left hand.
The red sap obscuring the creatures’ exact appearance dripped down as they stood up, and their real form was revealed. They were like thin vaguely human silhouettes made of silky smooth dark-red wood. They had nothing comparable to a head or a mouth and yet they produced a blood-curdling scream. They charged. Sofia could barely see them move as they appeared before her and attacked in unison with one arm each. Their pointy wooden arms lashed out horizontally at Sofia from both sides like a pair of scissors.
It was hard for Sofia to fight her instinct to try to evade but she stood still, and the attacks harmlessly curved around her, their force leaving a deep x-shaped laceration in the opposite wall.
Scary.
Using the last of her mana, Sofia simultaneously activated the third tier of [Runeforged Overlord] as well as [Erredian Rot] and charged forward, body-slamming the two twig monsters standing before her.
The rot spread through contact with the bone armor as it was enveloped in a thin layer of holy light. This was the best way she had to precisely hit the monsters without spraying rot everywhere and possibly ruining whatever magic item was hiding within the roots of the giant tree.
Covering the monsters in rot was successful, and ramming them into the wall too, but Sofia lost the Order state of [March of the Envoy], the monsters stuck again as they freed themselves from the wall, and Sofia died, her head sliced into eight pieces.
Astelia was in high-alert, her mana clutching around the Academy’s catalyst hidden within her armor, she was scanning mana and space in a wide area with her eyes closed. Sofia had just died, which was part of the plan. If anyone was waiting for an opportunity to attack the students like Sofia feared, it was now or never.
The twig monsters charged Astelia, who stopped them with her specialization, but she would not be able to hold them for long.
Nothing came of it, and Sofia was reborn three seconds later.
Nothing?
Still, stay alert, Pareth.
I need to help Asty fast.
Sofia’s heart flew out of her chest.
----------------------------------------