“Why do you hesitate brat? End my suffering!” The sludge underneath Seth’s boots rumbled as he stood over the diseased behemoth. A smirk crawled across his face as he lowered his weapon.
“Oh shoot, I forgot! Man, I would SO love to help you out, but unfortunately I am only a tier two. I don’t think I would be able to pierce your hide.” He said with a mock disappointed sigh.
Rulik growled for a moment while dust billowed from his nostrils.
“As much as this pains me to say brat, my body is only a shadow of its previous might. Even a relatively strong tier two attack should be enough to at least injury me. Take as many swings as needed, the agony of this curse overwhelms all.”
The beast closed all four of its eyes, yet again waiting for him to end its life. A few minutes passed in silence and the creature angrily opened his eyes before glaring unseeingly at Seth.
“WHY DO YOU WAIT? KILL ME NOW!”
An echo of power rippled through the air, but Seth did not waver.
“Sorry, but you said a strong tier two attack could hurt you. The thing is, I’m just a support type of fighter. I don’t have any real combat abilities.” He quickly gestured to the glaive in his hand. “Even this thing is just a prop to scare people off, see?”
Seth turned over Anar in his hand before shattering it over his knee. The pieces all scattered into the sludge under them before promptly disappearing into black smoke that reformed in his hand. Rulik’s eyes narrowed as he seemed to study the weapon.
“Hmm… well it does seem kind of peculiar. No matter, don’t you have any combat abilities?”
Seth looked dubiously at Rulik while the creature’s eyes seemed to look right next to him. He curiously looked over to his clone that stood on the other side of the beast before withdrawing the ability back into his body.
“Oh, that was just an ability of mine, it’s not real.”
A glob of blood and sludge spat out of the monster’s open maw.
“I’m not talking about that little illusion you idiot.”
Rulik turned his attention back to the spot next to Seth, “Don’t you have a voice of your own?”
Yet again Seth stood dumbfounded while the beast talked to no one.
“Uh, there is no one there.”
Upon his claim, Rulik narrowed his gaze. After a moment of silent thought, the monster seemed to overcome whatever was on his mind. “It seems my senses are farther gone than I thought.” The monster turned its milky eyes back to Seth.
“If what you say is true, then you will need a stronger weapon. Do you truly not have anything else to use?”
Seth watched as a spark of hopelessness began to grow in the ancient beast’s eyes. Finally, it was time for him to strike.
“Well, I might have something that could help, but it was extremely expensive, and I don’t think it’s worth a lame reward like a low-quality tempering.”
Realization dawned on the creature before rage replaced it.
“You dare to try and swindle me brat? Without this curse I WOULD SQUASH YOU LIKE A BUG!”
The sludge underneath Seth began to gather in a tendril but then abruptly fell limp. Anar vibrated hungrily in his hand, waiting for the next sludge tendril.
“Unfortunately, that’s not going to work grandpa. It takes way too long for you to form one of those things.”
The disgusting beast began to tremble in place as fits of coughing erupted from his mouth. It took a moment for Seth to realize that the creature was crying.
“DAMN THIS BLASTED CURSE! HOW HAVE I BEEN REDUCED TO SUCH A SORRY STATE?!?!”
Pus started to flow from Rulik’s eyes.
“Please boy… just kill me…”
Any person with morals would probably feel bad watching an ancient beast beg for its death. Unfortunately, Seth simply did not care.
“Cry me a riv…well I guess you already have. Just cough up a better reward and I’ll slay you like you want.”
This seemed to upset the monster even more.
“I can’t do that you little brat! That would violate the terms of my contract!”
A bubble of rage re-entered Rulik.
“Just leave my sight then brat! If you don’t slay me, some other dolt will. If you think I care about waiting, you are wrong. I would rather wait another millennium then be manipulated by some peasant!”
Stolen novel; please report.
Seth walked closer to the face of the dying monarch with a cruel grin.
“Are you sure someone else is going to come? I thought you said no one has come for thousands of cycles? And who knows, if someone might accidently cover up your little trapdoor, then I don’t think anyone would ever find this place. What a shame that would be, huh?”
With an almost imperceptible shudder, Seth finally saw a new emotion that began to fester into the grimace of Rulik’s face: naked fear. At this new sight, an unknown sensation began to grow along his spine. It was like an ice-cold fire that started to spread along the entirety of his skin. Seth's body slowly reacted to the feeling, causing his muscles to tense and his skin to constrict. Pores stretched open and his teeth clamped together in a strange, bared tooth grin that felt both unfamiliar and wrong.
Strangely enough, the monster beneath him seemed to react further to Seth's new expression, creating even more pus tears to dribble down his face. In almost a trance, he stepped away from the hulking monster and headed back toward the ladder.
“It seems you need some time to collect yourself. I will be back at some point, and I expect you to be more agreeable by then.”
Reaching for the first rung, Seth started to ascend in a quick, methodical pace while the long-forgotten monster beneath him threw a torrent of insults and curses at his back. This time, the trip up the ladder was empty of boredom.
--------
As he finally reached the trapdoor that signaled the entrance to the challenge, Seth was elated to be back in the open air. Although a far cry from clean, the air surrounding the toxic pond was marginally more bearable than the stank, still fog that was inside Rulik’s grave. It had been even worse after the loss of his makeshift mask that now sat somewhere in the sludge deep underneath his feet. After closing the trapdoor and making his way over to the shore, Seth painstakingly climbed back up to his comfortable perch in the trees.
Even though his whole body was screaming in exhaustion from the multi-hour long climb up the ladder, he still wasn’t going to stop and rest when he technically hadn’t completed a challenge today. So with a small break to reenergize himself, he ate some bread from his cache before activating the slew of abilities needed to hide himself amongst the trees.
Finally, he summoned Anar and then swiftly bolted off toward where the next known challenge was. Unfortunately, he only traveled for barely five minutes before he unknowingly ran into a fast-moving object that knocked him out of the air. The impact was surprisingly not painful, so he quickly recovered and landed gracefully. The same could not be said about the object he collided with, because he watched it flop loudly into the mud a couple meters away from him.
Although perturbed by the fact someone was able to sense him so easily while traveling amongst the trees with all his stealth abilities activated, he speedily recovered his wits and darted behind a dead tree that sat opposite from the way he thought the object had come from. Stretching his senses, he carefully casted a poor illusion of bark over his skin using Fear Itself to further cover his presence.
After a few moments of silence, a strange groan sounded off from the spot where he remembered the object had landed. Recognizing the sound to be of a living being, Seth wasted no time before rushing the suspected monster with a ruthless downward slash that would bisect anything up to tier three in durability. What he did not expect was to find a skinny boy with an arrow through his leg staring in horror and confusion in the opposite direction of Seth’s silent attack. In a flash, Seth absorbed the rather shoddy equipment of the brown-haired boy as well as his lackluster muscles and large multi-hued mace that should’ve been impossible for the boy to carry.
Realizing the situation, he pivoted in place to halt his attack that should’ve split the boy’s skull right open. His tired muscles squealed in response to the abrupt halt and Anar vibrated annoyingly at the lack of blood that met its pearly white edge. Without a second of hesitation, Seth bolted back to his previous spot next to the dead tree and rapidly assured that all of his stealth abilities were at full effect and that Wicked Being was not active. Soon enough, another arrow whizzed through the air and sparked off of the boy’s mace.
“I won’t go down that eas-” the boy squeaked out before another arrow appeared from a completely different direction sheathed in purple dimensional energy.
True Sight was the only thing that allowed him to see the lightning-fast projectile shoot right through the neck of the ill-prepared boy. In a split second, the boy was dead. His lifeless body dropped back into the mud while Seth held his breath, unaware of the location of the sniper. With only the power of his tier two abilities standing between him and certain death, Seth poured all of his confidence and focus into maintaining Specter State and Stalker’s Anthem, while at the same time refining the illusion of wildlife surrounding his body.
After an excruciating two minutes, Seth sensed a new presence enter his line of sight. A woman dressed in a brown cloak advanced upon the fresh kill. She held a rather complex looking crossbow over her shoulder that was clearly responsible for the previous arrows that took the boy’s life.
“Too easy. These royal children have no tact or grit at all. The only thing that stops them from dying to their own stupidity is the ridiculously expensive equipment and unique abilities their families give to them.”
She reached a gloved hand down to the corpse, picking up the multi-hued mace. In a flash, the mace disappeared like it had never existed in the first place.
“But damn, I’m going to make a fortune from these little shits.”
Seth continued to hold his position while silently observing the woman. Because she was wearing a cloak, he couldn’t see any distinct features from her, nor could he sense any energy emitting from her figure. Even with True Sight, the only defining thing on her person was the large crossbow. It had a sort of scope on the top that seemed to have multiple settings, and the body consisted of an azure stock, accompanied by a grey barrel. After a few more minutes of her scouring the body, she finally stood up and disappeared back into the wilderness.
Although she left, Seth continued to sit still with absolute concentration for another ten minutes. Eventually, he dropped the illusion when his energy started to bottom out. He released a sigh of relief before cautiously making his way over to the body of the dead boy. He stared at the glassy, open eyes of the skinny corpse before kneeling over him.
“Tough shit, kiddo.” He looked to have been probably seventeen, not even that much younger than Seth.
Better him than me.
He thought emotionlessly in his mind. He slowly got up and was about to head out back toward his initial destination when a soft feeling started pulling at his consciousness. Instinctively, Seth reached a small tendril of energy toward the dead body of the boy. As he made contact, a screen entered his vision.
-Anima cannot be stolen, the user did not kill the individual.
-The individual’s cache is still intact and has not been claimed. Would you like to claim the deceased individual’s cache using Plunder?