About eight minutes after the start of the ritual, Sofia walked in the air as fast as [Dodge - me] allowed her to without switching stance, surrounded by a swarm of small Destroyer skulls ripping through the Sunless. The Drones all around were dying fast, consumed by a thick layer of rot. They were not too dangerous because their only attack with enough range to hit Sofia, the rain of black balls, would get completely deflected by [Dodge - me]. Still, Sofia needed to be smart about how she moved through the sea of Sunless Drones, as she had to balance the high mana expenditure of the choir and of constantly spreading more [Erredian Rot] with the mana she could steal from the Drones dying with [Heat Death] when she killed them herself with the skull choir.
If only they died from the rot before running out of mana…
So far, no amalgam had formed, which was something of a miracle, but the Drones were slowly getting closer and closer to the hill through the sides the group wasn’t covering. It was just impossible to defend everywhere at once, and more Drones kept incessantly appearing at the back end of the enemy lines.
This is not gonna work, some drones are already reaching the rows of bone spikes.
I’m coming back, Bookie you keep focusing on preventing amalgams from forming.
Before Sofia could make her way back halfway to the hill, an attack from behind ripped a tree-trunk-sized hole through her torso, piercing through the bone armor like paper.
That could have killed me.
Sofia turned her head to look, far to the southwest, in between hers and Pareth’s zones, an amalgam had managed to fuse, towering over the smaller drones, and absorbing more of them by the second.
With a precise long distance ray of holy light, Sofia covered the amalgam with rot, and she kept it going for several seconds, burning through her mana reserves, but making sure the amalgam was completely drowned by the mana-eating magic.
The amalgam answered in kind, firing a second black lance in Sofia’s direction. Sofia could decide to dodge, but the fast movement would cancel her ability to walk on air so instead she dropped her staff and punched the incoming lance. The Dragon-scale armguard stopped the lance, but the shock was so violent that what was left of Sofia’s bone body cracked and crumbled from the force. She prevented the broken pieces of her body from falling with [Bone dominus] and urgently glued everything back together as she kept walking toward the hilltop.
One more black lance came after that, but it was not aimed at Sofia’s head, so she let it tear through her lower body before she almost instantly reformed it with new bones. Finally, she was back to her field of bone spikes, which the drones were barely just reaching, so she could stop walking on air and instead just run, jumping from bone spike to bone spike. She was back inside the hill fortress before another black lance could come.
Stopping near Bookie, she tried to speak, but her artificial lungs were all mangled, as she had reconstructed her body in a hurry.
How’s the situation?!
“Brother Pareth is doing fine on his side, but my soldiers are starting to die!” Bookie worriedly explained, clutching his book form with his gloved hands.
And the ritual?
The ritual would be over when the flames on all four sacrificial pillars had burned out. Sofia had feared that they somehow had to hold out all night, but she thanked the Lords when she saw only two of them were still burning.
“The second one just went out,” Bookie told Sofia.
So we’re already halfway through. Just another ten minutes!
A black lance tore through the hill’s walls, leaving a gaping hole behind, and finishing its course into the sky after failing to hit anything of value.
Such a steep angle, the amalgam came this close already?!
At least, the hole in the wall was quickly closing, since the blessed construct counted as a skeleton, it could heal itself. Sofia looked outside through a token, and the rot-covered amalgam was slowly trudging through the serrated spikes, preparing yet another black lance.
This won’t hit the altar either. We’re good. It’s dying.
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Still, this is bad. More amalgams will form. Summon the Templars.
“Yes!”
Bookie held out his book form with an extended page for Sofia to tear. For some reason, this was slightly faster than Bookie doing it himself.
Sofia’s vision ran through all the bone tokens as the templars formed. The amalgam had finally just died within the garden of bone spikes, consumed by a thick layer of rot, but already Sofia could see two more forming on other sides. Pareth was holding on well, at his maximum size, cleaving through Drones with a giant scythe like a farmer harvesting grain, but the Kidjikkik Soldiers on bookie’s side were dying one by one, severly outnumbered and backed against the bone spikes.
Pareth, change of plan, go after the amalgams only, we’re preparing the templars.
Without Sofia having to say anything, the three templars took place at the sides of the fortress, as far from each other as they could, and started to channel [Holy Smite].
Don’t release the spell until I tell you to!
Sofia climbed on top of one of the watchtowers and helped Pareth with the newly-formed amalgams, sending support in the form of waves of rot and weak but well-timed explosive angel’s bolts to give him some breathing room from the amalgams' attacks.
As they handled these two amalgams, more started rising from the other sides, and Sofia had to jump off of the watchtower to avoid a black lance. The [Holy Smite] was ready, but following Sofia’s orders, the Templars kept fueling the spell, wasting mana but delaying its activation.
Hold! Pareth, come back!
Pareth was taking hits after hits, most did not do much, but, under the focused fire of several amalgams, the black lances actually got through his defenses a few times. They struck at his larger bones, and managed to shave off fifteen to twenty percent of his health each time. Even with the [Bone dominus] healing, his skeleton was starting to crumble. He teleported back to Sofia. There was no one left outside of the hill fortress to keep the drones and the amalgams from advancing.
The large plains of serrated bone spike did a decent job at preventing the amalgams from just running in, they were not too smart and kept impaling themselves on the defenses, making them easy targets for Sofia to cover with rot. Alas, that did not prevent them from sending black lances their way one after another.
Luckily, the altar was relatively small and in the middle of the hill fortress, so most of the black lances that pierced through the walls were flying at an angle too steep to possibly hit it, even when they had the correct trajectory, they just flew over. Still, Sofia felt the world slow down each time another black lance pierced through the walls. The bones’ healing could barely keep up, and the walls were starting to be more hole than whole.
This better not mess up the ritual…
It’s just a wave of instant death, surely a magic rock would be unaffected?
Sofia let the siege go for as long as she could, and another of the pillar’s flames died down. When one of the amalgams managed to jump most of the way over the rows of spikes, landing right next to the hill’s cliffs, she gave the signal.
“Now!”
After holding it for so long that their mana reserves were almost empty, the templars let their spell resolve. The battlefield turned silent.
A violent vortex of mana appeared in the sky above the altar, from within, a torrential flow of mana fell, cascading into the fortress. The mana was sticky and cold, it covered everything, and flowed into every corner, engulfing itself through the many holes the black lances had left in the bone fortress’ walls.
[You have been affected by : Instant Death. But your skills negated the status]
[You have been affected by : Instant Death. But your skills negated the status]
[You have been affected by : Instant Death. But your skills negated the status]
…
The wave of Death washed over the flat plains, kill notifications assaulting Sofia by the thousands.
After a few long seconds, the vortex weakened and disappeared.
The ritual was still going, and the battlefield was still silent.
Sofia looked at the situation outside. All the Sunless in a radius of about two kilometers were gone, leaving only countless pieces of Sunless debris littering the plains. But the army of Drones extended much further, they were slowly closing back in.
“We’re almost there! Just four more minutes! Pareth you hold south, I hold north!”
Sofia was almost out of the fight already, her regeneration stunted by the lack of ambiant mana, but she had one last tool.
Could the demon transformation be used even now that she lacked a proper heart to consume? The answer was: yes. If she had no flesh heart, a bone one would do, as long as her veins of light properly overlapped with it, she instinctively knew it would work.
Can I even get level debts anymore?
Sofia chewed on the black bone heart that shot out of her chest.
Tougher than usual.
In her demon form, she rampaged through the endless waves of Sunless drones without a care in the world, killing dozens of them with each swipe of her tail and each strike of her claws. In the fortress, the beam of light from the altar was becoming brighter.
Sofia’s demon claws extracted the core from a Sunless amalgam when the sound of a bell rang over the plains. A wave of light ran through the sky, illuminating the plains like it was broad daylight.
The Sunless all disappeared.
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