“I defend, you attack!” Sofia commanded. She grabbed a large handful of vision tokens from her storage and threw them all in the air, spreading them throughout the flaming library, then she called upon the skull choir, summoning as many destroyer skulls as she could.
The fiery hands shooting out from the flames were on long, thin arms of fire, which could extend several meters to attack, and Sofia had to manually control the destroyer skulls just to repel the many hands that soon started to assault herself and Cinthia all at once.
The destroyer skulls clashed against the fiery hands, failing to damage them at all, but still forming a good enough blockade under Sofia’s direct control that very few managed to actually get through. Cinthia blasted these with essence tokens until they burst, sending flaming sparks flying everywhere, most of which got stuck mid-air inside of her [Slow mode] bubble.
The sparks themselves were too weak for more fiery hands to form within, but those of them that still landed on the ground spread more fire nearby, and flaming hands would soon emerge from under the two women’s feet.
Sofia’s brain was running at full speed, preventing the hands from reaching them was already hard enough, but she was also trying to figure out how to get out of this situation. The obvious way to get rid of the ends would be to quell the fire, but that was much easier said than done.
The fire burned even under Sofia’s feet, it felt hotter than regular fire but she was mostly unaffected, Cinthia also seemed to not mind, but hands started to form, one of them grabbing Sofia’s ankle. The fire fingers melted through her bone armor in an instant before she could react and blasted the magical hand into non-existence with [Heat Death].
A bone barrel appeared between her and Cinthia, which Sofia broke open with a strike of her tail. The barrel shattered, luminous blue water flowing all over the immediate surroundings. This was water of the underworld currents that Sofia had stolen from Hugo’s secret base, an eternally cold magical water. The water clashed with the flames creating an explosion of smoke, and all the nearby flames were smothered, leaving Sofia and Cinthia in the middle of a very shallow puddle of freezing water in the middle of the burning library. The hands still came from the burning bookshelves, but at least they now stood on safe ground.
“That was perfect!” Cinthia rejoiced between blasting away two fiery hands, “Got more?!”
“I have one more barrel!” Sofia answered.
“Ah crap… I still have a lot of tokens but the hands keep reforming no matter how many I kill!”
“I’m trying to find the source, hold one a bit longer!”
The flames were burning brighter and brighter in the library, bolstering the hands’ numbers as the seconds passed, meanwhile Sofia frantically defended and switched to her vision tokens one by one anytime she had a second to breathe to try to find anything, be it the source of the hands or a way out.
As her vision switched from token to token, she noticed something, behind one of the burning bookshelves, on the burning wall: a ritual circle, emitting a dark fiery glow.
Now that she found one, they became obvious, even from where she stood in the middle of the library with Cinthia, she could see another one slowly being revealed as the books burned.
The writing is on the wall!
Moving through the library was suicide. The flaming hands were not particularly fast, but they were numerous and their flames burned strong enough to inflict serious damage by simple contact, even the destroyer skulls, despite the constant healing from [Bone Dominus], were starting to be molten beyond recognition. They could not even be evaded by flying up, as the entirety of the library’s ceiling was aflame, and all of Sofia’s attempts at summoning the graveyard gave nothing.
I just need to bolt them.
Sofia channeled some mana into a weak explosive bolt, only giving it one second of channeling should be enough, she thought, and targeted the first ritual circle.
The bolt reached the bookshelf still burning in front of the ritual and exploded. The ritual circle was no more, but the flames nearby seemed to absorb the energy of the explosion and started to burn even brighter, creating larger, scarier hands.
Did that even do anything except make them stronger?!
If only the ring of Zar was empty!!!!
“The skulls are dying, can you defend?!” Sofia urgently asked Cinthia, who had already killed at least a hundred of hands by now.
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“Leave it to me!”
Cinthia stopped attacking, and started using skills Sofia had never seen before, invoking rectangles of light that seemed to hypnotize the hands and other things, but Sofia could not pay them too much attention. Activating the movement of summer from [Sixth’s melody] Sofia paid 40% of her mana for a doubled casting speed.
Locating and breaking every ritual circle on the walls was going to take too much time, especially with the tall shelves in the way that would intercept explosive bolts, so Sofia opted for the option of destroying all the walls instead. She made her shield fly to her back with [Bone Dominus] her started to dual-cast piercing bolts.
She could send six 10000 mana piercing bolts from each hand every second. Her agility and speed were already at a level where she could manage that, but the mental strain from such a quick succession of skill casts was heavy.
Bolts flew through the bookshelves in a continuous flow, creating a trench through the library’s walls as Sofia’s mana burned.
Sofia could barely tell when she managed to break another ritual circle, and slowly, she turned on herself, methodically shooting a volley of bolts in every direction.
Larger hands started to come, and Cinthia was having a hard time holding on, so Sofia summoned her last barrel of underworld current water, kicking it into the air with her tail and shooting one of her bolts at it.
The cold water spraying the hands bought CInthia a few seconds to breathe for her cooldowns to refresh, while Sofia kept trying to break all the rituals.
Finally, she felt it. The ring was empty.
“Cinthia, stand down!”
Cinthia dropped to the ground without question, and Sofia raised a hand, activating the ring.
The library’s mana collapsed onto the ring, with it a vortex of fire that tried and failed to burn Sofia’s draconic armguard.
It all only lasted for a second, and the fire was extinguished, until it started burning again. Sofia saw them all, three remaining ritual circles, spewing flames onto their surroundings.
Not giving the hands any time to reform, Sofia bet her remaining mana on a third tier [Runeforged Overlord] activation and rushed in.
With the speed of a meteorite, she punched the ritual circles one after the other, before finishing to empty her mana with an activation of [Regret] that brought her right back to Cinthia’s side.
The flames that were building up again all suddenly died down, and total darkness shrouded the library once more, or what remained of it.
“Did that do it?!” Cinthia asked.
“I hope so, but stay vigilant.”
Sofia heard footsteps as she finished her sentence. They were the same as before, from the invisible entity carrying a candle.
Sofia and Cinthia both looked in the direction of the sound, not making any noise. Sofia hoped to buy any time she could to regenerate more mana in case she needed to fight again.
A light finally pierced through the darkness, coming from the footsteps’ direction. It was a candle on a floating chamberstick, the same as before.
Then, suddenly, Sofia felt a void next to her. A strange air movement from Cinthia’s direction.
“Cinthia?” she whispered, extending a bone tendril.
Cinthia was gone.
What the hell?!!!
The footsteps stopped. Light suddenly flooded the library.
It was warm, orange light, like the fire of a candle, inundating the entire place with colors.
Cinthia was nowhere to be seen, and the library was intact. No traces of the bolts or the burn, no puddle of freezing water on the ground, no cinder and ash. Just a large, well-organized library full of old books, with Sofia in its center, and a flying chamberstick still in the air a few meters from her.
As if to answer all her questions, the dog skeleton appeared out of nowhere right under the chamberstick, barked once, and disappeared again, leaving a small wooden chest behind, on which the lit candle slowly landed.
There was no more magic in the air, no tension, just silence in the library and a confused Sofia.
Sofia walked up to the chest, stabbed it once with her dagger for good measure, and opened it after moving the chamberstick away from the lid and putting it on the ground.
The chest contained nothing but a small round rock.
“A heart of Velania…” Sofia said with a sigh of relief, she knew without even identifying it. She finally allowed herself to relax. Cinthia had disappeared because her task was over, she had been brought back to her own challenge within the palace.
“And the library is still there somehow. Thank you whoever built this place. I was going to have nightmares about so many books burning down for no reason…”
Sofia also checked the shield on her back. The ‘Hastening’ book was still there, although its borders were a bit charred. This had interesting implications, but before Sofia could focus her thoughts on that, she had to investigate another sudden realization she had just had.
She had touched and moved the chamberstick to open the chest, and yet, its candle was still burning. All the other candles Sofia had ever touched inside of the palace were always instantly extinguished without exception.
With an extended finger, she touched the chamberstick again. Nothing happened.
Focusing on her senses again, Sofia made a surprising discovery. This was not a candle like the others, it was a magical item.
[Eternal Soulflame of the Candle-Meistre]
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