”How can we begin to understand constellations when they transcend us in almost every way?”
~Excerpt from the Godly Chronicles
Once he entered back into the fight, the battle took a dramatic turn.
Instead of shirking away from the sword strike, the elite boss stopped in his tracks. The Berserker’s eyes widened as a vault portal opened above Crimson’s hand, and it pulled out a long, dirty, mangled staff from its vault that looked more like a stick than a weapon. A cold splash of fear doused the Berserker’s rage as 3 circles made of green, brown, and blood-red light manifested around the monster’s staff revealing the fathomless might beneath its mundane veneer.
Crimson waved its arm, swinging his staff so fast that it was nothing more than a blur in Devin’s sight despite his enhanced speed bestowed by Extreme Blitz.
The soldier met the crimson hobgoblin like a child careening straight into a moving truck, and was effortlessly smashed aside. The soldier dropped his sword as he plummeted to the treeline on the opposite side of the battlefield, sending plumes of dust into the air in his wake.
Devin gasped as the air around him grew heavy; he couldn’t even glance into the soldier’s direction, sure that Crimson would tear his head off the moment he looked away. The chaotic din around them disappeared as the elite boss directed its undivided attention towards him.
The pressure in the atmosphere around Devin increased exponentially as the red hobgoblin unhurriedly approached him. Its aura drove Devin further and further into the ground the closer it got—once again preventing him moving even with Berserker’s Rampage active.
Its apathetic, disgusted expression unnerved Devin, as if it was doing nothing more than taking out the overfilled trash. The thought reignited his anger; he growled, demanding his wrath to make him even stronger. The rivers of energy flowing through his body began to boil as he drew more power than he ever had before out of his cards. They, as well as the rest of his meta-system, shook from the strain, but Devin kept feeding them all the shards he could get his hands.
He rode on the knife’s edge between godly power, and dying in a fiery explosion.
Devin’s growl transformed into a roar as he fought against the increasing gravity. The crimson hobgoblin blurred again, brandishing its staff while heading straight from him. Devin gave it a bloody grin as he activated the very piece of equipment that made the elite boss so fixated on him in the first place.
He slipped through the gap between a couple monsters some distance away, leaving the bellowing boss behind him. Crimson took a few seconds to readjust, and find him in his army, but that was just long enough. Devin had let Berserker’s Rampage to run its course, sacrificing the immense gain in strength to reinvigorate all three rings floating over his head.
The storm gray and the sky blue circles surged with turbulence, while the violet, wispy ring in between grew a little more solid, burning all the more brighter.
The boss’s aura locked in on him. It didn’t waste a moment, kicking it into high gear so as to not let its prey disappear again, but Devin activated the equipment’s other ability, vanishing from the boss’s awareness once again. The crimson elite boss gored through multiple ranks of his own army to get to Devin, yet he found nothing—
—Nothing but a giant, opaque, blue hand covered in bloody veins. It had an ebony spear longer than the boss’s staff, held like an ice pick that was already stabbing towards the boss.
The three circles orbiting around the mangled staff spun faster; the boss blur again in Devin’s enhanced perception. The staff ripped through the conjuration and blew it away as if it was nothing more than a breeze.
One second.
The spear’s momentum carried it forward. Usually, the elite boss would’ve smacked it out of the air before it could even get close, even with its immense velocity, but Devin accounted for that.
Far behind the boss, hiding behind a pile of dead bodies, Devin poured an unbelievable amount of resources into the Red Cap to ensure the elite boss wouldn’t notice him. The shaking he felt on his head made him nervous, but he couldn’t hesitate—that’d kill him all the same.
The arcanist felt at the seams of his field that were dramatically inflated by his skills and cards, seeking to alter the way it worked just a bit. With all his resource pools topped off, Devin dropped the Collect Potential-portion of it as well as letting go of his cap, [focus]’ing on [seize].
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Two seconds.
The young man leveraged all the [seize]-imbued aether in the atmosphere and leveraged all his skills to direct the mass of potential to lay in between his bone spear and him with the crimson boss caught in between.
The elite boss’s eyes snapped to Devin, making him shiver, but he still didn’t hesitate. He unleashed the taunt band of aether between the his weapon and himself—
—Distracted for a mere fraction of a second, the boss failed to notice the weapon it disdained snap forward with a much greater inertia than before.
The flying ebony weapon boomed with a sudden acceleration, seeming guided by an unstoppable force as it glided through the air at supersonic speeds and effortlessly slipped past the monster’s guard, flesh, and bone.
The bone spear landed softly in his hands, surprisingly free from blood despite punching a wide hole through Crimson’s shoulder.
Its mangled staff dropped to the floor, smashing a crater into the ground so deep Devin couldn’t even see the bottom from his position. The elite boss monster roared, pain tinging its gravelly voice. It pointed its bloodshot eyes at him once again as its three magic circles found new places to orbit around his body. One for each leg, and the other for his last arm.
It growled at him; Devin didn’t need to speak Goblin to know that he was promising him death. Devin felt himself smiling as the three rings over his head pressed together to form a halo, inspiration rushing through his mind.
Three seconds.
Devin activated Extreme Blitz as the monster ran at him like a juggernaut, ready to put him into the ground with his momentum alone. Although the boss was slightly slower than before, it didn’t mean he was any less dangerous. Devin dodged countless kicks, punches, scratches, even a few bites the bastard tried to score.
His arcanium and stamina drained faster than ever, shaving off entire percentages of the resources from just a quarter second of use. Devin wished to alter his field again to have a chance in staying in the fight, yet [focus] forced him to concentrate on the fight. He couldn’t afford a distraction.
He weaved between blows, strikes, and tackles like there was no tomorrow. Because there wouldn’t be if the elite boss got its hand on him.
Three and a half seconds.
A multitude of magical projectiles flew towards them for the wall, but at the speed they were moving, the defenders might as well have been shooting blanks, not the boss even cared. The few times Devin was able to lead it directly into the path of icicles, fireballs, or even a bolt of lightning the size of Devin’s calf, the elite boss shrugged it off.
It flared its circles, and chased after him to no end.
Something pulled on his deckspace; a shadow jumped between them at similar speeds, quickly coming and going without confronting the boss. That didn’t stop her from leaving a present which Devin quickly grew to appreciate.
The boss unhesitatingly ran through the conjured cloud of {Itch Spit} between it and Devin. He watched in real time as the boss's eyes became more and more red from the poison rather than anger. Finally, symptoms grew to a crescendo, and the elite boss elected to violently scratch its eyes and face instead of pursuing its mortal enemy.
Putting enough distance between them for a volley of elemental projectiles of all types to come raining down on him. Even the greatsword wielding soldier came back to fight, screaming bloody murder despite his bloody wounds all over his body.
Giving Devin enough time to [focus].
Four seconds
The sounds of battle came blasting back in; the state of increased speed began to vanish as Devin stopped feeding resources into the combo. With those cards free, the arcanist kept a close eye on his enemy as he sought to find a common ground between three cards within his decks; Rage, Boar’s Charge, and Explosive Strength.
It was easy to find the similarities between Rage and the other two cards since he was already aware of the combos he could create between them; finding a connection between the other two cards themselves was a different story.
Without a combo already discovered or even a growth tree to support him, Devin was essentially flying in blind, but he didn’t waste the chance Dewey and the rest of the defenders were giving him. He rode on the inspiration he had earlier, concentrating his thoughts on speed, momentum, and inertia.
Five seconds. The violet circle between his and Dewey’s brightened even further, telling Devin it was off of cooldown. He slammed his cards and resources into the circles, [focus]’ing on the image of a raging wildfire—
The Original Berserker smiles upon you
Multiple Constellations look towards you
Rage + Explosive Strength + Boar’s Charge
The Origin of Fury
The Origin of Fury (Combo)
Become the conduit to the original spark
3rd Circle—Based on POW and Meta Scores
—and letting the Berserker do the rest.
The sounds of war disappeared again. The illumination from the floodlights, various fires, and even the moon and stars in the sky turned grayscale once more, leaving various hues of black, white, and the red that tinted in the Berserker’s vision.
The Berserker rose into the air, carried by the forming red body of an astral giant. He roared into the night, sending waves of immense power into the sky to demonstrate his dominance.
His enemy roared back, pushing away the horde of magical bombardments with the force of its aura alone. Its circle spun, sending flashes of bleeding light before it jumped up to meet the Berserker. He tried to smack the inferior being out of the sky, but it clung to his conjured body. It raced up his arms, somehow faster than the Berserker could react, and plunged straight into his astral body’s chest to get to the Berserker’s conduit.
He let out another bellow, melting the shape of his astral body to converge onto the crimson hobgoblin. Three circles met three rings as the crimson elite boss used its magic and physical strength to try to rip past the energy that comprised his astral body, but it was useless. The Berserker was formless, he couldn’t be destroyed or ignored with such simple tactics, and weak anger.
Without letting the monster get near his conduit, the Berserker invoked the skills within his conduit, using his wrath to stoke the flames of [refine] and strengthen the chains of [subjugate].
The elite boss monster guttural roars turned into wails as the Berserker converted the boss monster into fuel for a golden, iridescent bonfire. Although it had to sacrifice a bit of its astral body to lock the monster in place and make the fire burn hot enough to melt it down.
The wails echoed over the entire town, who watched in silence as the presence of a god descended upon them to torture one pitiful goblin.