CHAPTER 48 YEAH ALRIGHT BUDDY
We ran along the streets doing our best to quickly recover the ground they had covered carrying me out of harm's way.
They had made it a good distance into the city proper, part in thanks to stats, part in thanks to the buffs Marcie had handed out to help increase their agility. I had to wonder if just every [Mage] with wind magic had agility buffs on deck or if there was something else they were doing.
Maybe that was something I should ask about when our lives weren’t in danger.
The Harbinger, as they called it, had made it a few steps into the city at this point. Although each step was agonizingly slow, a single step covered roughly 200 feet of distance. Although it moved slower than me in an all-out sprint currently, I wasn’t willing to bet that this was its top speed. On top of that I had no doubts it would win in endurance.
From the distance we started at I could see flashes of light and magic and hear the cacophony of yells and strikes of weapons. There seemed to be a pretty large group doing their best to hit The Harbinger with everything they had, [Mages] that were capable of flight flitting about its waist and head while the landbound [Warriors] and [Rogues] coordinated striking efforts whenever a foot was nearby to hit.
So far their effort was in vain. At the very least the thing seemed to be traveling in a straight line, which we were technically in the way of, but that just made it easier for us to get closer and join the efforts.
As we approached I saw its first counter attack.
I saw all the mages flying through the air immediately starting moving evasively as soon as the missiles of magic formed, but even with the early sighting several of the mages were just too slow to actually avoid the attacks. I watched, helplessly once again, as the magic impacted and melted a hole through their torso killing them instantly.
Their bodies tumbled lifelessly to the ground. I steeled my emotions as best as I could and turned away from the dead adventurers focusing around me as best as I could to see where I could be helping instead.
At this point Fiona stuck a hand out stopping me, “This is where you stop. I don’t want you getting any closer to the fighting if you can help it.”
We were currently about 100 feet away from where any of the fighting was actually happening. I wasn’t sure if this was any safer than being 50 feet away or 500 feet, but I guess it didn’t really matter.
I nodded and came to a stop, Fiona resting her hand on my shoulder.
“If you can find people on the outskirts of the fighting that need help. Either that or you can go digging through buildings. As long as you don’t attack it, The Harbinger shouldn’t target you with any attacks. Just keep an eye on it just in case though. I don’t want you getting hit by an attack because you just assumed you weren’t a target.”
I scoffed slightly, “I’m not an idiot,” I said while rolling my eyes, “I know better than to let an opponent out of my sight even if it’s not actively fixated on me.”
She gave me a long look before giving me a single nod.
“As long as you understand.”
With that she removed her hand from my shoulder and ran off, Kaylith, Marcie, and Striga following closely behind. Marcie quickly taking to the air with a skill causing wind to flow around her legs causing her robes to billow outwards.
I saw several buildings were crushed on the other side of the walking calamity. Nodding to myself, I broke off from the fighting making my way around the outside of the fighting to get to the buildings that had already been hit.
I was roughly twice as fast as I had been before my tier up. I could already cover insane distances just off natural capabilities. It seemed that abilities weren’t a standardizing of strength, but rather an indication of the increase to your base capability.
For example having a high strength did not explicitly make you ripped or muscled. However if you worked to achieve that form and had high strength, you would be much stronger than someone who didn’t.
All stats worked off that same assumption. Well, Elves in this world seemed to be more something akin to the Elves that Tolkien or Paolini had envisioned. Beings that were faster, stronger, and more graceful than a human as a rule of thumb.
As such even with low stats I was exceedingly more capable than someone with similar stats. Just by how the nature of the system worked. Combine that with my overly inflated numbers thanks to having a third class as a gift by the Heart and I was really pushing the limits of my capability.
All this to say that I was moving fast. I could feel the wind pressure really starting to affect me at this point with how fast I was moving. A smile slowly broke its way onto my face, almost unbidden as I felt the wind through my hair as I covered ground with quick, powerful strides.
I was covering ground so quickly I wasn’t able to fully change my direction when I came to an intersection of roads, instead of trying to fully come to a stop I instead jumped and rotated myself to impact the side of a building feet first and use it to help change my direction quickly by pushing off in the direction I wanted to be going and correcting myself midair before landing on the ground and continuing on my way unimpeded.
At that point I laughed out loud.
This was way more fun than it had any right to be.
In another few short seconds I was hitting the areas that had first seen destruction from The Harbinger. I activated both [Electric Sense] and [Mana Sense], hopefully with these two skills I’d be able to find if anyone was trapped under the rubble of the buildings.
I didn’t immediately find anyone in the first building. I activated [One With Nature] to see if I could sense any plants or something in any of the buildings, but if there were I couldn’t feel them with the skill.
‘Ping’ [Accelerated Thoughts] Has leveled 1 > 2
Alright then, thanks.
I immediately pushed the notification out of my mind. I didn’t have time to be focusing on that.
I gave a quick glance behind me to make sure I wasn’t being targeted.
Awesome, The Harbinger was…
Looking right FUCKING AT ME!
“You’ve got to be absolutely shitting me!” I screamed.
“What?!” I yelled at the monstrosity, “What do you want?! Go away! I’ve had enough bullshit for the day! This isn’t even funny anymore!”
There has to be a limit, there has to be a point where something doesn’t revolve around me. In fact, it’s absurd that so many things are already. Was it the Heart? Could certain things sense the Heart? Was that what was giving me away? Maybe they could tell I wasn’t a native of this plane of existence? What was the deal?!
I took a deep breath trying to recenter myself.
Alright, no I could work with this. Let’s see The Harbingers next course of action first. Maybe I just arbitrarily caught its attention, but if it actually came at me maybe I could lead it back out of the city instead, that should at least help deal with the civilian casualty rates.
It let out a deafening roar causing me to cover my ears as best as I could.
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And then proceeded to start charging something, something I was pretty damn sure was a massive beam attack, given that it seemed to be partial to those.
“Nonononononononononononononononono!” I yelled as I immediately began running to try and get out of the way.
In the spur of the moment I started throwing barriers out. Several I threw in front of me creating steps that I could start leaping off of to gain height, the others I used the same strategy I had earlier to block arrows.
I layered several of them one behind the other creating a wedge that was several layers thick. I had no hope at all that this was going to be able to stop it, but it was the same mentality that soldiers wore body armor anyways. It wasn’t likely that it wasn’t going to stop a .50 caliber bullet, but on the off chance that you got lucky and it was a glancing hit? It just might save your life.
That’s what I was banking on right now. I quickly covered the distance, putting several hundred feet between where I had been and where I was while also getting dozens of feet off the ground.
I was probably 50 feet off the ground and about a quarter of a mile away from where I had been when the attack launched.
The rat bastard had course corrected, it hadn’t aimed for where I was, it was aiming for where I would be.
Immediately I felt my senses go into overdrive. The beam which was approaching frighteningly quickly slowed down considerably.
I immediately used my heightened senses to rearrange my barriers, instead of moving horizontally my plan was instead to go straight up.
I created multiple barriers at a slight slant to make it easier to land and instantly push off again and immediately began climbing. I covered nearly 100 feet in the span of a single second, rapidly bounding into the air at speeds that would have surprised me fully if I could’ve been paying attention.
Shortly after I hit the apex of my jumping the overdrive wore off and the laser passed underneath me.
It gouged into the ground superheating the rock. Normally you’d expect such a thing to spray dirt and rock everywhere. It probably would have done that, except everything it impacted pretty much just evaporated instead.
I stood on my barrier breathing heavily, not necessarily because I was exhausted, but from sheer terror of being atomized.
I slowly turned away from the carnage that it had created and turned to look at it instead.
From the height I was standing at, I could not only clearly see the mages that were blasting spells into its face, but I could also see the warriors hitting with all their strength against its feet in a hopeless endeavor.
We stood there, an impassive expression on its visage, as I waited for its next move.
I got lucky once, maybe I could do so again.
My heart was beating painfully fast in my chest, my breath was coming out in short gasps, and I felt a cold sweat making its way down my back.
The last time I had been so terrified was my first sighting of the Sentinels of Discord, just outside of Vinwood. Arguably this was worse since I was in direct sight of the thing out to kill me rather than being able to hide in a bush out of sight.
The seconds passed by agonizingly slowly as I waited for something, anything to happen to shake up our terrifying stalemate.
At that moment a beam of golden light filtered out of the sky hitting a spot near the feet of the Harbinger. If that had been an attack it missed gloriously, but I decided to make use of the slight distraction as The Harbinger actually turned to look.
I created steps out of the barriers leading down to the ground to break up my fall, although I left them spaced out pretty heavily, more out of a desire to quickly get out of sight rather than to be safe.
I needed a way to fly yesterday.
It didn’t take long for me to hit the ground and leap behind a building. Taking deep shuddering breaths as my legs failed to support me and I fell to the ground.
My stomach roiled as I felt nausea building up. It took all the effort I could conjure to keep it down.
I took another few deep breaths and then slowly pushed my head out around the corner of the building to try and get an idea of what was going on.
The Harbinger was no longer looking my way causing me to breathe a heavy sigh of relief.
As I kept watching I now realized why.
A white-gold figure was flying around The Harbingers head, every time it impacted against the massive creature it sent visible shockwaves through the air, there were other flashes of lights as magic collided with it in all manners of ways.
But none seemed to be nearly as effective as the flying figure. Mages were no longer in the air either, my suspicion was to stay out of the way of the person, or so I assumed, currently doing the most damage.
They actually seemed to be doing damage as well, small chunks were being knocked off with every collision between the two combatants. I could only hope that they could either win, or at least do considerable enough damage to push it back.
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George was not in a good state. He wasn’t nearly as strong as he had been before. On top of that he was more than a little rusty at navigating with wings after not having done it for so long. Even the gods knew that dealing with The Harbinger was an important thing and that putting aside issues you had with people was critical when dealing with it.
In fact, it was a stipulated rule across the known lands.
When The Harbinger approached, all conflicts were shelved, all grudges were cast aside, any trials put on hold until after the threat was dealt with. If you were still alive after everything you could carry on with what you were doing afterwards. Anyone who failed to follow this charter was executed.
Everybody took it seriously, because dealing with something that had it out for the sentient races was more important than petty squabbles. More accurately you couldn’t have petty squabbles if everyone was dead.
The Harbinger had been first noted in history roughly 3000 years ago. Or at least that was the earliest known documentation. It was rather difficult to transcribe dead languages when you didn’t have anything to compare it with.
Since then its kill count was in the hundreds of millions. This was a rough estimate given by how many people it killed yearly. It showed up at least twice a year, and each time it killed at least 10,000 people. Usually more given the population of its desired targets.
Usually as collateral as it tended to target large cities.
The Seltas Kingdom wasn’t the largest nation by far, but it wasn’t small either. It had a total population of at least 5 million people, most of which congregated here in the capital. I wasn’t entirely sure on that number since I hadn’t actually gotten a chance to explore everything and I wasn't the best at guesstimates. I’m sure someone could inform me better though. It could easily kill plenty of people here with how tightly packed the city was.
Which is why, even though George was an oathbreaker, his chosen deity had put aside their issues with his actions and answered his plea for power. Even if they couldn’t grant him his full strength that he previously had, they could give him a portion. Enough to use in a critical way if he was smart about it.
But even with this strength it wouldn’t be enough to stop the calamity from causing death and destruction.
Whatever it had been aiming at before had thankfully been towards the outskirts of the city, so while hundreds of people more than likely died in the attack, it was a far better outcome than tens of thousands with a single attack.
What was important right now, is that he was able to hold its attention and direct its attacks towards the sky now.
Each blow he struck caused the air itself to shudder around him. With how powerful he was right now, none of the other fliers could get close to assist him. Which was probably for the best anyways, they’d just get in his way currently.
Over and over and over again, George dove in striking against its face carving massive gashes through its rock like skin. And yet while he seemed to be causing massive damage to the creature, it seemed completely unperturbed by his efforts.
But he refused to let this dismay him. He wove in and out between attacks, powerful thrusts from his wings launched him out of the path of the retaliatory attacks The Harbinger launched at him, several he chose to cut through with his empowered weapon.
And with every opportunity he saw he scored another devastating blow against it. And yet… No matter how hard he seemed to be hitting, no matter how deep, or how numerous the cuts he placed upon its body it wasn’t even remotely distraught.
Inexorably it walked onwards toward the center of the citadel where the royal palace sat in all its splendor.
He frowned slightly, if his sword blows weren’t cutting it, maybe something that covered more area would affect it.
George raised his blade up into the air, whispering a soft prayer that carried through the wind.
Light streamed down again from the sky and this time, began coalescing around his blade causing it to glow with radiance.
After a few short moments George felt that he had gathered as much power as he could into his blade without it shattering under the stress. And pushed forward with powerful flaps of the wings extending from the backs of his shoulders.
He had enough energy for one good attack, so he prayed that this would be enough to actually do something to it.
As he neared its face he whispered out the name of the skill,
“[Righteous Indignation]”
With a deafening boom his blade connected with The Harbinger and discharged all of the energy stored in his weapon. Despite having limited himself slightly to avoid breaking his sword, the blade still shattered under the stress of the skill. The air around him was blasted away from the force of his blow as the sky around him alighted in the golden glow from the skill he had just used.
George slowly floated down to the ground as he looked up at the towering abomination in front of him before letting out a deep sigh.
As expected his attack, while powerful, had done little in the way of actual damage.
At the very least he had bought some time for the next challengers to approach.