As the Dawn Cloud contracted back to its original form and Rieren was pushed back out onto its surface, she tried to observe her handiwork. She had done well, that was for sure.
The monster had been struck deep in its guts area. A vicious wound marred its entire right-hand side. In fact, the injury was deep and wide enough for Rieren to see into the creature.
Ah. Now she saw what had caused that dull clang. Its skeleton.
The monster’s bones looked metallic, coloured ashen like iron. No, they were like iron. Hard and with a slight, rusted shimmer. That was the only thing that explained the sound her sword had made upon cutting into the Abyssal.
Growling and sniffling, the monster twisted around to face her. “This is nothing,” it spat at her, its bestial mouth frothing and baring its teeth in anger. “You will pay for this grievous insult.”
“It is nothing,” Rieren said. “But it is also grievous? Which is it, beast?”
The Abyssal snarled at her in reply, then barked out some quick order she couldn’t catch to the rest of the monsters in its little army. They had all gone silent after their leader had emerged from the cloud clutching a deep gut wound, but now they were all screaming and shrieking again.
Rieren frowned at the gathered army of Abyssals. It sounded like they had just been told that they could tear her apart with their bare hands.
“Making your little pets do your work for you?” she asked the B-Grade Abyssal looking at her with undisguised hatred. “I thought you were strong?”
“Your taunts have no effect upon me, mortal. The only reason you are not the one wounded or dead is because fortune favours you. And now you shall pay with your meagre life.”
Rieren smiled down at the Abyssal. It annoyed her just a smidge that she still didn’t know what sort of monster that was. But it didn’t matter. What was of import was the fact that, through their exchange, the one that had come out on top was her.
After all, the monster was depending on the little army it had gathered to strike her down. It wasn’t calling her down to the ground to take it on directly for it knew that its wound would prevent it from fighting with the same speed and ferocity it had shown at the beginning.
Well, it wasn’t going to work.
The monster suspected that she was smarter than she was strong, and there was only so far intelligence going to carry her against an entire horde of Abyssals. Sheer numbers had the potential to overwhelm anyone.
Rieren discarded that notion by jumping off her loud to land on the ground. “You have done well, cloud. You have earned yourself a good deal of rest.”
She wasn’t certain she was supposed to be treating a cloud as if it was alive, but then, she had received proof that it was intelligent. That was good enough for her. Acquiescing to her wishes, the cloud dissipated to nothing, releasing all the pent-up water of her Domain it had stored.
The Abyssal was still staring at her, still growling. She couldn’t tell if it was fearful of her or if it was actually thinking her a fool for thinking of taking it on the ground.
Since she received a feral grin, Rieren supposed it was the latter. But just before the monster decided to dip into the ground again, she turned around and faced the rest of the Abyssals around her. That sudden motion made them all pause.
Wasting no time, Rieren launched Gale Blade. She sliced into the monsters with no warning. Her Domain had already been turned to steam and it fell slowly in her wake to wrap the monstrous corpses in a misty funeral shroud. The Abyssals didn’t get to scream, didn’t get to fight back, didn’t get to understand what even killed them. Rieren simply eradicated them all.
She came to a pause when she recognized she had come to the other end of the monstrous army. A wide trail of corpses lay in her wake, all covered by her steam.
Rieren smiled. It was good to feel the lack of any debilitating effects from the use of her skill. She could let loose without holding anything back. Far off, she was certain the B-Grade Abyssal was watching agog. If it hadn’t been frightened before, it surely had to be now.
For the rest of the Abyssals, they were trying to disperse and run away now that they had seen they had absolutely no chance of standing against her. Rieren was having none of it. She launched into Gale Blade once more, scything into monster after monster until they were all lying dead. Unfortunately, she was interrupted before she could complete the massacre.
By more B-Grade Abyssals.
The sudden shift in the Essence was what brought her short at first. The first B-Grade Abyssal she had dealt a devastating blow to was now howling into the air.
“You think far too highly of yourself, mortal,” it shrieked at her. “It is time you met your match.”
The twists in Essence around the area started growing rapidly. At the same time, Rieren’s heart started pounding faster. With the way the Essence was shifting and corrupting, there had to be more than one B-Grade Abyssal approaching. Not good.
She’d had trouble dealing with one of their kind and had been forced to resort to a risky strategy to take it down. But greater numbers would make any strategies difficult to execute, which was exactly what the first Abyssal was hoping for. Even if she managed to subdue one of its fellow monsters, the others would strike her down.
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The point was that Rieren had grown strong, for certain, but she wasn’t strong enough. Hitting Enlightened realm had taken her to a new stage of power, but B-Grade monsters could take on anyone in the whole spectrum of the Enlightened realm. Sadly, she had only just hit it.
Rieren considered summoning her Dawn Cloud and making a quick getaway. She couldn’t be faulted for putting her life before taking any unnecessary risks. Having killed a great many Abyssals and obtained a good number of Credits, she had already achieved most of what she was seeking here.
But that was impossible too. The Essence was twisting in all directions around her. For a second, she wondered if it was one gigantic Abyssal enclosing her. But no. When she focused Essence into her eyes, she found several spots of virulent Essence growing up.
Rieren was well and truly surrounded.
Besides, there was no way of telling how fast these new Abyssals were going to be. If they were anything like her current guest, then they wouldn’t have trouble pursuing and keeping up with her, if not outright outpacing her.
No. Rieren hefted her sword. She was going to have to stay and fight her way out of this mess.
The monsters started appearing out of the night’s gloom. Rieren frowned. They looked… familiar.
One was obviously a Blightmane. The only difference was that the spikes on its mane were even more pronounced and more expanded than the one she had met in the dungeon with Mercion and Kerolast. Its metallic fur was also more whitish-silver than the plain grey of its D-Grade counterparts, and its eyes were as red as a blood moon.
The next one that appeared reminded her of a Shadeborn. Same gigantic body with a rotund middle, a pudgy head, stretched skin the colour of blood-tinged mud. There was a cleaver in each of its hands, and its guts already displayed a row of flesh-rending teeth each as big as Rieren’s entire arm.
At the end came a Malomen Shifter. It was also B-Grade. The monster looked just as she remembered, down to the reptilian head, the charcoal-black body, and the slim humanoid torso with a powerful swishing tail at the back.
Not good. One B-Grade monster had been bad enough. Several altogether wasn’t something Rieren was looking forward to take on.
Typically, she might have headed in the direction of the Shadeborn. They were large and cumbersome, easily slower than all the other monsters around her. But the problem was their guts. They could expand them outwards at ridiculous speed and reach, something only to have been enhanced by their ascension to B-Grade.
Since there was no other way to go about this, Rieren simply turned around. She summoned her Dawn Cloud. If the little cloud really was sentient, it at least didn’t show any fear at being called up to face nearly half a dozen powerful Abyssals.
Rieren threw herself atop it. At the same time as the monsters rushed at her with screams, shrieks, and roars, she aimed the Dawn Cloud back exactly the way she had come and shot off towards the injured B-Grade Abyssal she had left far behind. Fast as the monsters were on her tail, especially the Shifter and the Blightmane, she had a good enough head-start on them.
Her target was certainly surprised to see her rushing straight for it. Stuck. It was stuck. If it ran, it would be dishonoured in front of its contemporaries. But at the same time, it was too wounded to face her directly.
By the time the other monsters reached Rieren and the Abyssal, she might very well have killed it.
It would seem even Abyssals laboured under the burdens of honour.
Rieren brandished her sword, keeping her eyes focused right on the monster. There was only a split second for it to decide, and when it finally chose, she smiled. The monster had elected to face her directly.
With a screaming roar that sounded like metal bells being torn apart, the Abyssal rushed into the air and charged at her. Rieren’s grin grew wider as she rose to her feet on the cloud.
But just before they collided, where she had been ready to try the same trick that had delivered the gut wound, the monster swerved to one side. It bypassed her completely, rushing off to one side. Was it trying to circle around and attack from the rear with the other Abyssals?
“Cloud,” Rieren said. “Up!”
Another advantage Rieren had over most of the monsters was elevation. Among the gathered Abyssals, the only one that could truly fly was the Shifter with its wings. As such, when Rieren rose straight up into the air with her Dawn Cloud, only it was able to give proper chase.
There was the injured Abyssal too, of course, but it still needed to use its limbs to reach higher into the air, essentially climbing on an invisible incline or tower. That meant it had to use a far greater amount of energy than Rieren’s cloud or the Shifter, both of which had a more natural means of rising. As such, it fell far back as Rieren raced the Shifter.
Divide and conquer. An adage passed down by the ancients as one of the key tenets of effective victory. Rieren used it to great effect.
She manoeuvred the cloud right on top of the rising Shifter’s axis of flight. That meant the ascending monster could no longer see her directly, and it was too close to let its sense tell her about the specifics of her position. She jumped high into the air and bid the cloud expand to cover an even greater expanse of the sky from the monster’s line of sight.
Considering the Shifter didn’t burst through cloud, it had to have come to a stop in trepidation. And then it smashed the entire cloud apart with an expanded, boulder-sized fist.
That released a tremendous burst of Rieren’s Domain water in its face. It distracted the monster just enough. For, at the peak of her leap when she began to fall downwards, Rieren launched Gale Blade.
The Shifter never saw her coming. She slashed downwards with blistering speed. Her first slash cut along its oversized arm to spill a tremendous amount of blood and viscera. She grabbed onto its head before her momentum carried her past it, managing to twist around so that the next slash cut vertically down its body.
Rieren grabbed onto its tail before she fell too far. The monster could no longer expand a part of itself as it might have done before, not with the cuts she had left all over it. Nor could it react fast enough to stop her. She had already launched the third slash, using the end of its tail as the point from which to throw herself at the remainder of the Malomen Shifter.
Her momentum took her several paces above the creature’s now torn-up head. As Rieren came to a pause at the peak of her aerial travel, she launched the last bursting slice of Gale Blade.
Unable to reform itself into its larger version because of the grievous wounds, the Shifter tried to attack Rieren directly. It didn’t work. She was too fast. Slamming between its arms and right into its midsection, Rieren cut through and past the dying Shifter with ease.
Her hair whipped behind her as she fell towards the ground and the rest of the Abyssals. They had gathered together in an effort to confront her altogether. Smart of them.
But Rieren brought up her Domain and then her Dawn Cloud, landing on her little summons well above the monsters. If the one she had already wounded wished to reach her again, it would have to climb up and face her.
She thought about exulting in her victory, and resting up a bit since the constant battles and the use of her skills were wearing her out, but she froze in alarm.
An Abyss Rent opened up right next to her.
There was no way Rieren wouldn’t recognize the jagged hole in the air. How in the world was one forming in this air like that? She urged the cloud to draw back, but what came out of the Abyss Rent wasn’t another monster as she had feared.
It was Elder Olg, borne on the back of Batcat.