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The Metier Apocalypse [An Apocalyptic LitRPG Adventure]
B6 - Chapter 24: A Warlock's Leverage

B6 - Chapter 24: A Warlock's Leverage

To say that healing one's eyeballs was a pleasant experience would have been a bold faced lie. While the damage to my body was painful, the sensation of slowly recovering a sense while feeling the cones and rods that granted you that simple human blessing being restored from flashbaked husks left me squirming. I added a whole new type of injury to the many I'd endured in my quest to defend the people of the surface.

Sadly, the healers weren't strong enough to completely restore my sight and body as well as the dozen that had also been hit by the collateral of the fight. As such, I implored the woman healer to focus on restoring at least my right eye over getting my left arm operational. It was a bit nightmarish, to think of yourself trapped in your own body, but I didn't dwell on it. There was still an old lady to help out, and a hurricane to punt out of town.

The lack of depth perception immediately nagged at me, but I tried to compensate with the help of vibrosense. Thanks to Harmonic Sinews I'd gotten plenty of practice 'isolating' senses and with its new omnidirectional improvement through Diffracting Tissue the effort was less jarring. A headache was already brewing as my brain welded new and more complex connections. That thought gave me pause and I realized I was still connected to the Hummingbird Charm, boosting my Refinement, which was likely why I was adapting as I was. I'm going to have to keep this up. I don't know if my brain is going to tap out the moment it stops being propped up. I sent my mana pool a nervous glance on my Status, seeing it tick down a percent down to fifteen.

The downtick is going to be slow, thankfully, but that gives me very little available to work with myself. I felt through the floor, vibrosense pinning onto Fievil and Blobby who were finishing up the reinforcement of the weather tower support. Even without the relentless attacks of the Anemoi's entourage I could feel the sway of the tower had grown more pronounced. A four foot wide, ten foot column of stone was no light addition to an already eccentrically loaded structure.

"The fresh spawn are flocking!" the call went out. The man who'd been working to get my muscles in order flinched, sending a strong burst of healing right into my kidney before cutting out the effort. It had, unfortunately, been enough of a loss in control for the man's magic to push me over the edge.

Subject: Ronan Terrigan

Health: 57% (Overhealed, Neuropathy - Varied, Muscular Strain - Varied, Sprains - Varied, Flash Blindness - Left)

Mana: 14%

I swiped the notification out of my view, grimacing at the pittance of Health I'd managed to recover. The downside of being as sturdy as I was was the equivalent amount of effort it took to recover. I resisted the urge to look at the rest of my Status and the changes to my Attributes I could practically feel tingling through my body despite my injuries. It was unlikely anyone else except perhaps an elemental or higher Quotient Earth Attuned would have been able to get back in the mix after getting struck by the combined lightning attack. Nevertheless, it had done a number on me and even with the worst of the damage repaired I was barely fighting ready.

"Thank you, but I will manage. Go help the others," I huffed, glad to finally be able to take a proper breath. It was a small thing, but I could already feel my body starting to recover even if it stiffened as Slurry Ichor started to bruise pretty much my whole body.

"Master Vanguard," the man started hesitantly. Whatever he was about to say died when I locked my working eye onto the man. Goosebumps rippled across his skin, their presence bright as day. He bowed low, rushing over to where more people were fighting for their survival atop the tower and dragging the other healer with him. With my eye working once more, I could tell that while the sharp rain was no longer coming down, in its place were dozens of Q1 and Q2 elementals. Handfuls of these were easily dispersed by each attack from the defenders, but their effects on the local storm were increasing by the second.

"Fievil!" I groaned, using my one healed arm to rise with the help of the Totem's Shard Weapon as a makeshift crutch. Ballast moved the weight of the weapon right to the head, saving me some effort as I gathered my feet. In response to my call, the Totem zipped through the air to sniff at my body with its many nose feelers. A growl rippled his ethereal form, but I sent it a gentle head pat through our mental connection.

On the tail of the Totem was Blobby, the slime quickly slipping around my body to help prop me up. It was somewhat embarrassing how much relief not having to carry my own weight was after eating that beam to the face, but we were a team. What better marker of team work than supporting each other.

"Thanks Blobster," I said, turning and squinting with my good eye into the heart of the hurricane.

Just like when Eurus had first made their appearance, the sky and the earth were in a tumultuous state. The biggest difference came in the form of the strange natural formation that had surrounded the Anemoi when it arrived. Before, it had been as if an enormous eye had taken shape from the patterns of clouds, lightning and rain. Now, that eye was being disrupted by a little foreign body to ridiculous effect. A blinding point of silver and navy blue light zipped across distances that really a lady her age had no right zipping by, without even taking into account the fact that she was flying. Streaking bolts of lightning tried to pin her, as if Eurus' eye were trying to glare her out of existence. In response, beams of ice swirled in horizontal tornados that further disrupted the structure of the hurricane. Each of the attacks swallowed at least one of the many mating pairs of elementals, weakening the cohesion the Anemoi had managed to cultivate. Throwing in the two downed members of their entourage and the others that were nothing more than cores whimpering in the wind thanks to the defenders, Eurus was without lynchpins.

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"So, disruption is the name of the game," I said, spotting the slightest sputtering of the light Eurus was outputting. "Fievil, you feeling up for a fight?"

The Totem was all teeth as I transferred the plan through our connection. Immediately, the axe hammer became a beacon of caramel light within the storm. The stretched thin Arcane Sink pulled tight against our little trio before spell chains started to manifest in the air one after the others. It was a considerable dump of energy, especially since Fievil wasn't trying to dilute the power he put into the Skills. Before Fievil slumped onto Blobby's half formed shoulder, five of my mana pool's worth of were waiting for activation. The quantity of mana had set the air to vibrating, each set of glyphs having a strange resonant effect that I'd only really seen in combination attacks.

I immediately got the urge to experiment, but held it back for the sake of our true target. Fievil still had some energy remaining, but acting as the catalyst for that amount of energy stretched him thin in some metaphysical way. Of course, if I had used that much mana I would have probably torn every muscle I had, and probably some more I didn't. Our creation already superseded any previous working of magic the Totem and I had completed. With a nudge of will, I aligned the fifteen spell chains sequentially before me. Gift Wrestling the Primal Sky Monarch Elemental sounded like a terrible idea, but I doubted even they could ignore the power of five Q6 Earth Attuned attacks.

Fievil and I synchronized our intent. My voice reverberated as power flowed through me. ""

One feature of that Skill I rarely used due to the need for me to leverage it myself was the fact that I could imbue it to others. While my testing with the Skill told me it was sight based, just like all my other ones, the spell chain still had to travel to the target. In order to kill two elementals with one stone, the train of helped protect itself from the interference of the storm while also juicing up the Shaman with a terrifying amount of magic.

I could only compare the flying spell chains to an Earth version of the beam that had done me in. They swirled through the air, rotating faster and faster of their own volition as they homed in on their target. It was hard to see anything specific even with my boosted Perception, but I saw the silver and blue blur try to dodge the cascade of spell chains. A bolt of Eurus' lightning struck the beam, and I felt the tenuous connection to one of the spell chains crumble. While it had protected Sharon, the woman seemed to have dodging in hand and needed help with a counter attack.

"Who has voice augmentation!?" I yelled, turning around to glance at the defenders. I did a double take when every single one of them was staring at me with their jaws hanging open. I also noticed that the low level elementals were dropping from the sky like flies in muddy, glassy, slurry or sandy piles. When my eyes adjusted to the strange rain of creatures, I realized that Arcane Sink had expanded to cover the entirety of the weather tower. The density of the magical field was a shadow of its normal state even when untargeted, but that was enough to disrupt the weakened parents and kill the fledgling elementals by the dozens. Fievil, go!

That was all the direction the Totem needed before he was on the prowl. It didn't matter what the remnants were, the mole was slurping it up and growing more solid by the second. Most of his targets were almost inconsequential to his relative level, but after being gassed it made a difference. It was a damn buffet.

"Sir!" An elf stumbled toward me, forcing Blobby to catch him to prevent him from faceplanting in his rush.

"You my voice augmenter?" I asked. When he nodded, I motioned towards the Shaman. "I need her to hear me."

"I-" The elf hesitated, his voice quivering for a beat before it turned rock solid. "I'll make it happen."

I pointed my good arm, Fievil in hand, towards the dodging form of Sharon. A tickle ran around my neck. "Sharon! Take the spell!"

An unintended side effect of the bass boosted reverb of my voice was that Tremor Frame and Diffracting Tissue both activated in response. My voice warbled as energy was added to the elf's magic. The two combined caused a physical distortion in the air, punching a hole right through my Arcane Sink and blasting apart one of the many elementals attempting to escape my Domain. Unimpeded, the message flew through the air like a crack of thunder. When it reached the Shaman, it was as if she'd been physically struck and a faint echo of my words reached even all the way back that we were.

She staggered in the sky, only narrowly avoiding a forked tongue of lightning, before she dove towards my caterpillar of spell chains. I didn't know what I expected, or what Sharon would do with the magic, but the instant disruption of the storm wasn't it. There was more than one shout of alarm when the Shaman seemingly exploded into a cloud of sand and mineral chips dozens of feet across. The sudden cloud of wet sand was a lightning rod and the electric tendrils that had been outlining Eurus' eye disappeared into glass. The grey-white clouds turned a hazy brown as the loose sand was swept away into their mass and the frenzied rotation of that many halos created its own cyclone counter to Eurus'. The life-like manifestation of their eye became nothing more than a washed out sketch in the sky.

As the cyclone of sand took proper shape, a silver and blue star shone from within it. A cackle loud enough to send goosebumps up and down my arms reached the tower. Sand, ice, and wind detonated, killing god knew how many elementals before stripping Eurus of their final protections. The backlash of the force sent a flickering comet of light my Perception identified as Sharon streaking for the earth. Silver wings of light sputtered into existence before faltering as the woman spun head over heels.

Fievil! That single thought was enough, and the mole reacted with visceral fury. He had a distinct dislike for his friends falling from the sky onto the earth, apparently. took shape almost half a mile away from the tower. I wasn't sure how the Totem measured the trajectory but I threw in my intent into the spell chain, overlapping onto the borders of the working with Fievil's stored mana as the ground heaved like a baseball mitt to catch the Shaman. The impact threw sand up in a plume and Fievil sagged from the expenditure of mana, almost two pool's worth in an instant, just after recovering. The Totem turned into a cloud of caramel light before sinking into the axe-hammer.

The Arcane Sink fell away, releasing the weakened elementals to scurry for the sky as fast as their semi-physical bodies could take them.

There was a heartbeat of pause as defenders and hurricane took in the developments in the fight. Then Eurus howled.