Day 22

My feet dangled off one of the tallest skyscrapers in the city above the smog and planes. I sat on the roof, looking down into blackness under the light of the dungeon’s false sun. The abyss of smog below looked back at me, questioning. Blood dripped from my clothes down through the dark clouds. Bloody footsteps followed in my wake, and my clothes clung to me little more than strips of fabric soaked in blood and gore. My skin had gotten used to the sticky feeling, and I was already nose blind to the smell. Behind me, a five-tailed fox dressed in a strange steam-powered suit of armor with magic runes carved in the metal stood. I counted six effective runes that either enhanced the suit's workings or helped enhance the wearer.

He must have tracked my scent or found my footprints leading out of the sewer. Even if I couldn’t shatter his mind, that didn’t mean I was unaware of it. Finding someone to fight with was something I liked. I wasn’t talking about cutting my way through a civilian population.

Killing was something I hadn’t dreamed of being good at. While monsters lived in a kill-or-be-killed world, I was supposed to be a monster tamer, and I would have only killed to feed my monsters. My opinion on my actions was always changing. Seeing the smog-filled sky didn’t sway me one way or the other. The Kitsunites had done well from my point of view. They were the upper class, the winners in this game of survival. Maybe I would snag one of their engineers along with the empress on my way out.

Unlikely, I was bound to find something more interesting if I kept my options open.

A sudden shortness of breath worried me. Something was wrong and it didn’t have anything to do with the guard that tracked me here. The world spun, and I struggled to keep focus.

I was here for treasure; being greedy was not a bad thing. Power was on the table in vast quantities, and after this fight on the first floor, I wouldn’t come back for a full 100-day month. I needed to get my house in order. If anything, I might send small bands of adventurers from my population down to work on their skills and collect loot.

As for my guest I dodged a tail covered in fell energy and countered a gust of wind with one of my own. Two more tails joined in, and the air pressure changed.

“Calamity by order of the empress, you will be destroyed.” The soldier said.

Steam billowed out of the power armor as a fist the size of my chest encased in metal and riveted up the arm flew at blinding speeds. It swept through, and afterimage, I ducked under the attack, planted my foot on the would-be hero’s backside, and pushed. The power-armored fox stumbled forward, its tails twitched, blasting its body with updrafts, but it seemed the fox was untrained in wind manipulation. No, it was more that the monster wasn’t prepared to use wind on itself.

A man standing twelve feet tall, made from blood, with iced-over crimson skin, ten-pack abs, and a black halo sitting over its head raised its palm. This Avatar, Blood of Malice, Blood Temple, and Cold Blood are used together to form a far greater whole. I was prepared to use Skill Fusion to create a skill proper for it but held off until I managed an Avatar for my mana.

I watched the fox regain his balance and turn with his tails whipping about. Blades of biting wind tore open the concrete roof, all stopping before my own Fell Wind.

The creature I created had its own will, an angry, brutal thing without mercy.

A Blood Lance fired from the creature’s hand, impaling the fox through the chest before closing the distance. The monstrous Avatar thrust its hands into the wound, and blood quickly flowed out of the monster.

The Avatar of Blood screamed a silent roar before returning to my side and vanishing into the dimension of Blood Temple.

Having only a single Avatar skill felt like a mistake. It was a skill meant for Skill Fusion. Creating a humanoid creature for my Avatar wasn’t required. With some more study, I was sure I could make more fitting forms for my skills. Before I contemplated Skill Fusion, I wanted to get more skills of the type I wanted to use. There was something I was missing about the skills themselves.

I picked up a skill shard from the fallen body.

Skill Shard

Steam Punk

When I focused on the skill, I saw tiny groups of symbols inside the crystal. I couldn’t begin to decipher them, but it was important.

I thought about kicking the body off the roof, but that would be rude. Letting whoever the guy was with find the body would hopefully bring more of them out. The guy wasn’t a terrible fighter; he was just green. Killing enemies in their thousands helped me fine-tune skills the fox was only touching on.

Holding two fingers together, I created a small, highly pressurized stream of air and used it to cut the armor off the monster. From what I could tell, there was a coal-fueled boiler in the chest of the suit. Despite the armor, a single Blood Lance ripped through it easily. While the metal of the suit was of a descent alloy, it wasn’t anything compared to my swords. Either the steel-making methods of the Battle Chickens were lost, or the people arming and armoring the foxes didn’t want them to survive for long.

Parts of the boiler near the chest had running metal, meaning the heat from the boiler was slowly eating away at the metal. Sooner or later, it would have burst and shot hot steam into the fox’s chest. Someone set these guys up to fail. By the way, the guy moved; they were only around four times faster than a normal fox soldier, which was disappointing. I checked the pelt, but the Blood Lance ruined it with all the internal organs in the chest and spine. The body looked freeze-dried like the mummy monsters found in the Kamet Desert near the Green River far to the West.

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

With all the rune work etched in the armor, I expected to see some runes to protect the user from blowing up, but there were none. That was concerning. With a little better outfitting and deployment, the foxes could be better opponents.

I didn’t go out of my way to kill this one. My attempt to merge my skills into a form that used all of them showed a lot of promise. Its first appearance was a little extreme, but I would get used to it with use.

…

One of her Praetorian guards hadn’t checked in after his patrol. Later investigations found his body atop Neke tower, implicating them in a conspiracy to assassinate her, according to Minister Farnsworth. There weren’t many signs of a struggle and no camera crew to catch the fight in their medium. Pictures taken by Dr. Raito’s team show an investigation into the armor of her guard. In other words, the Calamity was learning how best to hunt her protection.

She debated adopting a promising young individual among the engineers and scientists in her palace; hopefully, they could keep the empire together if she died. Akane nervously fiddled with her tails as she sat at her desk. Then she heard fighting in the palace. Akane looked outside, and the weather had betrayed her.

…

My Avatar punched through a set of ornate double doors that made me cringe at their destruction. Anything I could carry out was mine, and the oak doors carved with foxes painted in the colors of imperial royalty looked like perfect additions to my home. I could put them in my house after I built it or maybe in a building for my dungeon.

I envisioned a set of staff, including some merchants, to sell weapons and buy off items found in the dungeon. After all, I didn’t plan on being isolated forever. Soon enough, I would have tamers and mages coming to try their hand at exploring my dungeon for a fee.

While I didn’t personally do pay to win, I wasn’t against using it to my advantage. A smirk sat on my face, not from the challenge, as my 12-foot-tall friend blasted apart the foxes. Heavy weapons fired down a hallway when I tried to cross through. I shook my head at what could have been a death on my part. Fortunately, I had my own ways of doing things.

I found the wall where the gunner stood, separated by a foot of concrete, and let my Avatar thrust his lance through it and the gunner. My blood Avatar pulled the gun back through the hole, ripping it from its installation and taking the ammo belt with it.

My right eye pounded from the effort of micromanaging the blood avatar. It had little intelligence and was hard to control but incredibly useful. Besides, I needed to get some kind of training from this fight. Rank 2 monsters stopped being a challenge after Rong Da.

I felt that if none of them could give me a fight like that, then I wouldn’t treat them seriously.

More guards in power armor fell to me as I made my way down a hall of cameras to the office of the empress. Instead of a sexy fox, I found a half-burned mad scientist in a lab coat standing beside a guard outside his armor.

“So you are the Calamity come to ruin our nation. The Kitsunite nation will never surrender to the likes of you.” A small smile spread across my face at what the doctor had in his hands. “Do you see the instrument of your downfall? The nation that raised me is stronger than Rong Da and stronger than you. It's already too late to stop us.”

I sat my backpack in a corner where I hoped Fu would be safe.

The doctor pushed down on the plunger, shooting the black substance into the neck of the guard.

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep. I thought you would ask why no reinforcements were coming. Nationalist pride is always welcome. At least someone has a nation worth being proud of. It’s a shame I was tasked to destroy it.” I said.

Fiery blue fur pushed out of the fox’s body as two new tails grew from his backside. His face elongated, forming a long snout; his body fell on all fours, and his hands turned into paws. Flames gathered on the tips of his tails before he crossed the distance and slammed them down on me. I blocked rapid, heavy attacks with my blades, deflecting the tails as the monster leaped and slashed with its claws. Bloody slashes ripped through my chest, and it dodged my kick, follow-up slashes, lances, wind blades, and Lightning Strike.

In a single exchange, I fell down my list of options until I realized that what I was dealing with was a peak rank 2 existence. A smile spread across my face, bigger than ever before. My heart, which had been at a steady rhythm, pounded in my chest as adrenaline poured into my system.

The monster shot forward, crossing the room in a single bound as blood stakes formed a wall around me. It jumped, somersaulting backward to bleed off its momentum before its tails flashed and it opened its mouth. A ball of flames formed bright enough to blind me before blasting the ground in a long white laser of death.

I shattered the floor under me, settling a floor down as the ceiling above melted into slag. A fell slash sliced up through the ceiling as flaming paws dug down onto my floor. Its head moved in, and I slashed with my blade slicing through its nose but doing nothing more than pissing it off. Molten rock fell like rain, and sparks flew into the air as I blocked the monster’s claws.

The air burned, and the fell energy went with it in a phenomenon I hadn’t seen before. I paid attention; it was one point in dozens that I kept track of in the fight. While it wasn’t useful in this fight, there would be others.

Despite the substance in the fox’s body, its flames tore at fell energy, thoroughly negating it. I shook my head at my first observation that wasn’t right; otherwise why wasn’t the fox’s fell energy weakening. While I could feel it burn fell energy like coal as bloody steam exited the monster’s wounded nose the fell energy wasn’t burned by the flames.

Somehow the monster was absorbing the fell energy to fuel its powers. In a world drowning in fell energy the monster would never burn out.

The carpet under my feet burned as the monster shot down and slashed as it grew larger with every breath. I choked on the air as it burned everything away. My lungs burned, but I continued fighting. My blade countered not only its foreclaws but its tails as well.

The monster continued to drag fell energy into itself, condense it and burn it slowly. It shot forward with both paws fully willing to commit as I choked on a lack of air. My lungs burned, but my vision remained the same.

My blood avatar appeared and melted like a man made of wax before an open flame; it threw lances of blood that dissolved before they hit the creature. I let my smile continue growing larger as I burned through the fight.

I opened my mouth and laughed silently when I wasn’t passing out from a lack of oxygen. Truly, I had charged in the direction of superhuman.

Strategy was unpracticed, besides tactical decisions. For the first time since fighting Rong Da, I began thinking about how I would achieve victory. I could see in my mind’s eye the path of victory based on the fox’s own tactics and attributes. While it continued to gain energy for attacks, the building was cut off from the outside so it only had so much fell energy to absorb. With that in mind, I made a series of long-reaching strategic objectives I had to reach to win.

All I had to do was hit it in the right places to ruin its chances of pulling a win. The monster couldn’t win, so its loss was inevitable.

Beating it with my chainswords was a win in 200 moves. Any other tactics would only lengthen the distance between myself and victory. I licked my lips as I counted them down, carefully turning my footwork into a dance of death as one of my slashes nicked one of its paws. I turned my blade just right to draw blood and then turned the way I needed to. A slash would barely graze the flesh above its left eye. The cuts were hairline almost useless against such a big, powerful monster. I laughed again as I counted down adjusting the number by the mistakes either of us made. With slight twists and the right timing, I nicked the monster in many different places. Strikes it perceived to have won out in were actually paving to way to my victory.

I nipped the joint of one of its elbows twice in our exchanges, relying on my after images to survive long enough to barely scratch the beast. My mouth was so dry I couldn’t wait to quench it on the monster’s blood. Steam or not, I would find a way to quench my thirst.

The monster stumbled after 190 exchanges, and I capitalized on it. A clean under the arm severing tendons before I moved back into position. Blinding by its own steaming blood on its left side. I took its speed down as it kicked with its back legs but lost its maneuverability. I could taste the win.

I threw my dominant chainsword and watched it embed itself in the monster’s chest. Steaming gore flew out of the beast as the saw continued to spin, pulling the monster’s insides only stopped by ribs until I shot forward, gripped the handle, twisted it, and plunged. Between ribs, I dealt a mortal wound and leaped back as the monster collapsed while swiping with its good paw and trying to bite me.

Silent laughter left me in great heaving fits as the monster tried to bite at my embedded weapon, only to catch a mouth full of steam. In its distraction, I moved to its side and cut its hamstrings. When its legs collapsed, I stood at the base of its tails and slammed down with my chainsword. Intense heat burned at my face, but the pink saw blades would not be denied. 9 tails fell, leaving stumps behind. Steam poured out of the monster in great spurts as its head shot at me as its one good forelimb moved. I cut the final tendon as it tried to turn in my direction.

I kicked the monster over on its back, impaled it from under the jaw to the brain, and grabbed the handle of my other chainsword. With an easy pull, my weapon was free.

That fight worried me. The fox shouldn’t be a threat with the skills I had, but it almost killed me. There was something wrong with me and my skills. Was there some truth to monster skills being incompatible with humans?