My ploy worked in my favour; the monster gravitated to me so quickly that the guards might as well not exist. That would hopefully give them time to dwindle the undead and give the mixed poles a chance to pin down the humanoid cavalry that was the ungodly gremlin thing… If it was a gremlin. It was hard to tell.
It was mostly the same, a horrid mutinous ogre that seemed like it spat in the face of the gods and their graces, just with extra ick and hairless features that might imply it was once one of its lesser kin.
I suppose they didn’t eat their veggies… Which I hadn’t really seen in their camp now that I thought about it, it was mostly meat and random stuff.
It drew its eyes like rot drew flies fast enough to make its neck crack and pop as it tracked me through the air. Its casting did not halt. Instead, it seemed to speed the process, like it flexed its muscles.
It started turning to face me as well, palpable furry emanating from it toward me.
“Profligate!” He shouted, a wall of bile coming off the figure as it began to force a spell to completion.
Its focus was both good for the unawares [Guards] and Anna's idiot brother, who would have been hit with a spell, and bad for me because I was unable to move.
I was in the air, and unfortunately, I could not fly nor change where I would land.
Based on the rate it completed, I would have only two seconds to land and move out of range, and I needed to use that conservatively.
Preparing myself, and trying to glean anything I could from the spell, I found that I was going to land on my neck, and I was going to be hit by a spell… And that was about all.
I had no clue what it would do, it was just black magic to me, kind of hard to tell it apart when you couldn’t see what kind of mana it was… Assuming there was even a difference to begin with.
Reaching out as best as I could, I extended my arms to try and roll on my hands in a cartwheel.
My arm touched the stone, and I started to turn, my legs speeding on while my arm slowed my top half, and I rotated. Then, as with many feats I achieved, I managed to fuck it all up.
My hand lost traction, and I slipped. My hand cupped Selly as I slipped, my shovel flying back along with me as I rolled painfully before I ate stone with the side of my head a few times, followed by seconds when I slammed my hip into the beam of the closest building, the shovel luckily clattering next to me.
The pain sucked, but not as bad as “[Path of Wrath],” would have if it had hit me.
The spell in question snapped away from the monster, its horrible power glowing etheric in my sight, the energy collapsing into a five-foot line that screamed forth from it. The light chilled the air, sapping my strength as I shivered, my breath fogging, and slagging the paving stones. Everything in the five-foot line was fucking ruined, with a thin bead down the center of the path that was just molten rock that smoked, letting off a smell that made my eye water and sting.
And that was ten feet in front of me, right where I would have been if I hadn’t slipped like a moron.
That was two spells I knew, and there was still dark magic hovering in the air around it.
“Wow, I slipped, and you still missed me? Your mistress must have failed to teach you aim… Or is she just shit at it?” I asked him, “Because missing someone with a spell that wide is almost as impressive as missing the one you threw at me in an enclosed room.”
It released a screech and started toward me like a landslide-made flesh, the cloud of potential spells left behind. Getting to my feet and retrieving the shovel, I decided between trying to let him impale himself and not getting smashed bodily into a wall with a passenger.
I waited for him to get up to speed and hoped forward and to the side, getting spun as it tried to smash into me, the force of its passing like a ship, buffeting me. He charged through the line of cold and frost formed on him in his passing, a visible swath cut in it as he moved.
I regained my footing, spun, and realized I would be in a bad spot if I stayed.
Quickly I moved, threading through his path, the air chilling me, but more refreshing than anything where he passed.
I heard Selly sigh as she cooled down.
“Oh… That hits the spot,” she said, a yawn on her weird two-part mouth.
“You awake? Time to fight for our lives, sleepy head! Hop off so I can get hit without killing you.” I told her unsubtly.
“Huh? Were… Oh. Oh man I was out of it, Yeh, yeah ok. I’ll help out where I can, you won’t be disappointed in bringing me! Uh, oh hells. [Take to the Sky]!”
She was confused, I realized, almost like she had woken from a dreamy sleep. The heat must have gotten to her. I was warmer now, but I could imagine it being far worse with how tiny she was.
With her words she took to the air, zipping straight up with her skill before she started to buzz, her clipped wing hissy as she fought the air current that dragged he up.
She seemed to flip around before zipping off toward the Humans, leaving me be.
I… I did not expect that.
Shit.
I turned back to the mound of rotting meat that was the monster and found it pulling itself out of a wall, meat falling away only to knit together again. Monstrous regeneration met with less than mundane damage.
Well… I guess I was only intending to play keep away. Annas brother… Er. Clause intended to fight it but didn’t want help because he was being a man.
I was just here to ensure he didn’t get swatted with a spell… And to give him time to get here through the undead.
I still didn’t think I could stop it on my own.
I had a good ten seconds to act, so what to do?
My eyes fell on the cloud left behind and moved toward the caustic cloud of potential spellwork. If I couldn’t fight him straight up, I could certainly try and fuck with him until the rest got here.
Neither of us could flat-out kill each other, which made collateral damage more important; he just didn’t know it yet.
As I made my way, the beast pulled himself free, screeching, “I smell your fear [Saint]! You weakling. Your words, EEyyah, mean nothing in the face of my love! My dark missstress. She will see your ambitions crushed beneath the weight of her, he- Eeyal.”
I didn’t have that many ambitions and I doubted he knew what they were, but playing into his complex, I shouted back, “Doubt it? If your little miss is cut from the same cloth as you, she’s a bottom feeder. One who picks on the week because she can!”
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As I shouted, I reached the cloud, a feeling of nausea holding around me and started doing the only thing I was actively getting better at, randomly poking stuff magically until it exploded, worked, or did nothing.
[Tenebral Bane] licked its lips, magical senses telling me the mana in the air was there but also tick. I reached out with my magical shovel and started waving it through the shrouding gaseous tumour like it was a fart cloud.
And the fart cloud moved.
Not much, but it sure as hell moved more than I could have hoped for. There was a resistance, not physical but magical, as if the air was full of sugary taffy. It was familiar, and yet so very unfamiliar.
I had never used a shovel like a wooden spoon to magically mix mana, but I had used a shovel to haul muck. It was like that, but facing up instead of down and with magic instead of muscle.
It was also slow, and the Monster was no fool. For every moment I spent dispersing the magical cloud, it gave the monster time to recover and make it’s way over to me.
Clause shouted, “[My Blade Never Dulls!]” and a few of the guards shouted other skills in a similar vein, like, ‘[My arm never Tired],’ or, ‘[Endless Vigor].’ One shouted in a matter so high pitch it sounded like a woman, “[Backstep]!”
Amongst them, a tiny voice shouted from above, “[Not One Step Back], [Cull the Horde], [Bring them Down!].”
Her words washed over all of us, my body feeling suddenly sturdy, my feet holding strong. It also brought my focus back on the monster as it stomped through the blooming curtain of cool air that fought the heat of the air. Its presence was uncaring about the draft.
I could see the mana in the air as it lightened, and figured out how it could both melt and cool. The air was low on heat mana, it had shunted it into the attack, striping the mana outside of the path. Clever.
The monster took a stance like a charge, and I dropped down into a stance to try and let it impale itself, my vision looking for a point to let a true strike land. It shifted around, some points ringing weaker before being shoved around as its body mended some unseen point.
Its intent fell upon me, but I held firm, the feeling not new. It was the sensation of knowing an enemy stood in front of me, that it was a being cast in dread, inhuman. A being of violence. It felt not unimportant, but less important.
It moved, and I started scrabbling for the magic I would need to enhance my weapon, trying to mould the magic inside me like shifting clay, following my intuition. I sucked the life from myself, tugging it to cascade into my reserves, the life empowering my reserve and granting me death mana, the feeling stinging as I pushed it through my body.
It committed to a charge and I leveled my weapon, braced myself and focused on not giving away what I was doing, focusing so hard on my internal world that everything faded away.
My sight, hearing and sense of touch became distant as I focused single mindedly upon the one and only thing that mattered at the moment, getting my skill to accept the death magic.
It was surprisingly like moulding clay; my internal mana could be moved so much more freely than the stuff outside of me. I didn’t even know if it cost mana, it certainly didn’t feel like it cost any.
It was just that there was stuff in the way, like my body. It was a bit tricky, but I certainly preferred my insides not being rearranged, so I worked with it and pulled the mana around and down inside of myself toward a central point. Just like before, my eyes nearly closed, just barely open, stinging and watering with the effort it took just to keep them open.
A tiny piece of me I didn’t know existed, a hidden muscle, flexed and pulled the mana into me, and my skill kicked it out and into my spade beyond the point the monster could swerve. The feeling of the release made me woozy from the sudden loss of it, but my body kept me up as I sucked in a breath.
It had taken ten seconds, perhaps, but the second twelve was marked by the impact of the monster connecting chest first with the same object that now carried a bane-infused, death mana-enhanced improvised magical weapon.
It swung at me just before it crashed, feeling the edge of the blade huming with death mana, seeking to unmake dark constructs. I couldn’t tell if it was me or the way it ate the cloud around me, but it was enough to make the monster pay attention, that was for sure.
The arm it threw out missed me enough to make my short hair woosh as it passed, and my blade met cloth, then flesh, then bone.
The monster impaled itself on the iron of the shovel, my feet planted with Selly’s skill resisted as it pierced the fabric and wrapped the figure effortlessly before the magic of the blade slid through the meat.
There was a lot of meat and fat, and unlike its lesser kin, its flesh still resisted; enough mana or skills were present to slow its passage, but my feet held firm.
The moment it hit bone, the skill snapped, unable to keep me from being pushed back. Selly’s skill was unable to defy the world.
The bone resisted, the blade slowly etching its way into the outer layer as the force of the charge carried me back, my feet slipping on cobbles as I tried to hold my balance, tried to push into the strike.
Behind me was a wall of wooden buildings, and I decided that I would rather not be broken on it. Sucking in a breath, I pressed down with my foot and pushed it down into the cobbles. Pressing into the monster, I used my whole body, pushing until I could practically feel the bottoms of my feet sanding themselves down. Heaving with all the strength in my body, muscles screaming, body flexing itself as ridged as it could, and the force of the monster I pressed against, my feet shattered the cheap paving stones.
The blade shattered the bone with enough energy. Meat came out the other side while my ankles nearly shattered, the toes of my feet breaking off as they dipped into the stone.
We both screamed, agony in both of our voices while the magic of the weapon made its best impression of a million tiny [Swordsmen] inside of the monster's body as it started to catch up with me, its body still moving.
The right half of its torso warmed as it expanded, ballooning before exploding in a red, meaty pop that sent the monster careening over me and into the wall as I fell backward and slammed my thick head into the pavers behind me.
A spiderweb of bright white light met me as my eyes snapped shut.
And yet… It was good.
Not the pain but the feeling of triumph. The feeling of succeeding in wounding the thing, even if it would just come back. I had no doubt that with time, it would just knit back together, but that was meaningless. I had hurt it, and that sent a thrill through me as I bit back tears, hissing in pain, rolling, clutching my head, barely gotmy feet screaming as I aggravated the stubs of where my toes had been.
It was so good of a feeling that it managed to blot out the pain for a moment, but only for a moment.
The shrieking made my ears ring, and it took me a moment to realize that it was the monster. It cried so loud it broke a pain of glass somewhere and my arms that clutched my head helped press my ears down.
Everything ran together for a terrible length of time, blurring as I sucked breaths down and the monster screamed, and everything was too loud. Twenty seconds and a million years later, I managed to get on all fours, my arms and legs weak and my eyes full of tears.
I tried to stand and flopped, tried again and managed to barely get my torso up as I balanced on my knees.
I looked over to the guards who were depleting the confused undead, a few arrows whizzing down from the rooftops, tearing into a few small figures I hadn’t remembered seeing. A million miles and four feet away, the Monster, a gaping wound, leaked Ichor as it thrashed its way upright.
Sucking down breaths, I tried to get to my feet, tried to stand on shaking legs for a few seconds before I fell back down, the pain in my feet redoubling while my head started to throb.
For a moment, I felt like everything was standing still, totally fine, then I doubled over and hurled, voiding the picnic on the cobbles like a drunkard as I lost control of my body. Back arching, I teared up as I sucked in breaths.
The ground shook a little and I didn’t look, the whole world shifting around before I looked up.
Up and into the air, I got slammed bodily into the air and toward the wall, my ribs creaking as they flexed.
Oh… The monster had kicked me.
I watched as the world seemed to slow, my head flapping as my ribs finally snapped. The damage began to mount as my body died, the use of death magic letting it cascade far more quickly than it should have otherwise.
I could see the guards cut down the last of the undead, Clause cutting one of them in half, which was quite hard without magic. I wonder how he did that, perhaps a skill to make the blade sharper than it could be normally.
As my head lulled I saw the pikes forming up to coral the wounded monster which was slamming the ground where I had been, forming some kind of spell.
Maybe I would get up before-
My entire spine compressed my skull, impacting the stone of the inner city before I died so quickly I couldn’t even feel it.
I fell painlessly into the fabric that separated the land of the living from the lands beyond. It cupped me as I fell, tumbling down and down and down as it held on, stretching to hold me tightly.
It was somewhat peaceful compared to the recent pain. There was more like stubbing my toe, sudden, then over, fast as a snap, then my body stopped hurting. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t have the skill prepared, and it showed.
Normally, I might have come back faster, but this time, I fell deeply into the dark, and it soothed me.
I felt, for a moment, that it would last forever, the world fading away as the soothing feeling of death enveloped me. Nothing mattered. The pain was over.
And then, the world reached its end, and I stopped falling, a moment of weightlessness before I was thrown back into my screaming, popping body.