Bloodstep makes me much faster than they can run, and a single usage of it no longer magically exhausts me, so I activate it immediately.
My first target is the Thief. All three of my enemies have basic classes, no evolutions to their name, but the Thief is one that may actually cause me irritation if I let him.
Thanks to my demonic body, I can see sharper in the dark, which has so far enabled me to keep a tab on him. If his Stealth trumps my ability to find him, though, he could get away and spread word about me.
I’m not entirely opposed to that—more adversity means more chances to level up—but I would prefer not to face the entire city at once.
He slinks through the shadows as if he’s already sure that he’s escaped.
I shatter that fantasy of his by appearing in front of him, Bloodstep outstripping his sprinting speed by far.
Silently, I stab forward with Phantom Shape. This skill is rather useful—I’d like to enhance it more, and that can only be done through constant use. I’m running close to the current 24-minute time limit, though, which is a bit disappointing.
The Thief manages to surprise me by avoiding my initial strike, ducking and weaving through the sharp segmented limbs with surprising speed. A skill of some kind?
If it’s magical, I can Siphon it, but his agility is enough that I might not actually be able to land a hand on him.
I still passively control the blood on the ground around us with Shape Blood, the magical investment low enough that I can have it on at all times. As such, I sense the disturbance that the female Archer makes when she finally catches sight of my new location.
One of them occupies my attention while the other prepares to attack. Were I a normal level 9 human with no class evolutions, I would be in real danger.
Unfortunately, I’m not a regular human.
Unfortunately for them, that is.
The streets are decorated with the results of battles past, and I draw on it, sending blood surging upwards to throw off the Archer’s vision and obstruct the Thief’s movements.
An arrow whistles towards me, undeterred by the blood, but I’m already moving, making use of the split-second distraction. It must’ve been fired off-center, aiming to not accidentally hit her teammate, since it only clips me instead of hitting me dead-on. That’s not enough to stop me.
The Thief’s suffered from blood hardening around his feet significantly more than the Archer has, and so he can’t stop me when I punch forward with my dagger, enveloping it in a Misty Blade.
Skill-enhanced steel parts leather and flesh alike as if it were warm butter, and I know from experience that Misty Blade is already killing him from the inside. Unlike me, he lacks Demonic Heritage and apparently also Pain Resistance, judging from his scream.
My second strike slits his throat.
Misty Blade advanced to level 4!
Bonus frost damage advances from 30% to 40% of an attack’s initial damage.
It’s not that useful of a skill, but I may as well seek to improve everything I can. It’s a shame that certain skills like Firearms aren’t feasible to level up right now while my Silver and Gold skills just aren’t really advancing. Perhaps I need to seek worthier opponents.
Objective: Reap the night
Targets killed: [2/10]
I’m moving before the dead man’s body even hits the ground. While Bloodstep is usable once more, I definitely don’t need to use it against a single enemy at this level.
That aside, there’s something else I want out of this fight.
The Archer nocks another arrow, and I meet her with a Blood Echo. She flinches back in fear as the scarlet duplicate of me surges forward, loosing her shot.
My Blood Echo makes herself tangible enough to catch the arrow in her chest, but of course a being made of blood isn’t even slowed by that. She raises the copy of my knife—and then she vanishes, her two seconds expired.
No level out of that. Shame.
As gallons of blood tumbles to the ground, I manipulate it with Shape Blood, catching the arrow Christine fired at me in the process.
I’m less than a second behind my copy, and I pick the arrow out of my mass of blood.
Rather than attack her with spears of sharpened blood, I simply throw nealry twenty gallons of it at her, deluging her with a torrent of the stuff. She falls screaming under the force of it, hitting the ground messily.
“What a shame,” I say, mirroring their earlier excuse to me. “Three Ravendale adventurers lost to the forces of demonic corruption.”
I kneel down next to her, prying one eye open with the blood on her face, and I shove her own arrow straight through it with enough force that it snaps.
She gurgles once and dies.
Objective: Reap the night
Targets killed: [3/10]
With the first part of my job done, I start on the messier part.
Devour granted +189 XP!
Temporary skill unlocked: Sharpshooter
When using this skill, you gain a 125% bonus to damage with ranged weapons. You are 80% less prone to distractions. Your accuracy is 10% better with ranged weapons.
Wow, this skill does a lot. While the skill heals me, stealing her vitality to replace what I lost, I kneel down and tear the bow from Christine’s cold hands, carefully extracting the quiver.
That’s when I notice that her body is dissolving. When I roll her over to take her arrows, the uneaten flesh on her back tears apart under my hands, soaking me in her blood. Her organs crumble away as the prone body falls on me, and her bones are starting to soften too.
I realize why when I look at the ground.
Even after death, the demonic blood refuses to stay still. It sticks to the Archer’s body, red human blood dissolving as the black fluid… saps it away?
As soon as I finish acquiring my new quiver, I look over to the other bodies. They look normal, but…
I walk over to the dead Warrior first. Sure enough, when I kick his eerily serene face, it crumples inwards as if there’s nothing but air inside him.
Despite my best efforts, Devour grants me nothing but the empty taste of ash.
It is, in retrospect, not something that should’ve surprised me. I doubt that I was the only one of the EVs to be created with the Devour skill, and I’ve never seen a human being with it. Though my sample size is still on the smaller end, that leads me to believe that it might be a trait inherent to demons.
If every demon is as hungry for advancement as I am, I can understand why even their blood saps away anything useful out of corpses.
Just to be sure, I check the Thief’s body too. A single kick has the corpse practically detonate like a rotten watermelon. No experience to be gained here either, and he’s freshly dead. I won’t be able to Devour anyone but the last person I kill if I ambush a group unless I store them far out of reach of any demonic influence—I’m sure any demons in the area would feast on these bodies if the blood didn’t get to it first. I
At least he has a couple of daggers I can take.
I have to wonder what the blood is doing with the drained bodies, along with why it didn’t immediately eat the demons I killed, but that’s less immediately relevant so I set it aside for the time being.
At level 1, Devour only gives me the temporary skill for a minute, so I make quick use of it, drawing and loosing an arrow, aiming for the Archer’s corpse’s head.
I miss, hitting the body in the shoulder instead. Fetid blood spews out of it, and I sling the bow over my shoulder, putting it away for the time being. I’ll focus on my priorities for now. The temporary usage of Sharpshooter isn’t going to make or break anything.
Three objectives are running at the same time, a record for me. The one that requires me to travel away from this nation isn’t achievable at this time (also, I don’t know how much I trust Saph, given that she clearly lied about not knowing me the first time she met me), so I need to focus on what I have.
Both of the two other active quests involve killing and/or eating things. That’s workable. My system doesn’t tell me how many demons I need to Devour, though I do have a quantitative answer for the “beings with levels”—seven more of those.
Speaking of which, the phrasing of that objective means that demons don’t have levels, unless I’m interpreting it wrong. That’s an interesting can of worms to open.
My plan remains unchanged. I’ll continue towards the city center until I feel satisfied or face foes that I have no hope of defeating.
And so I continue on, returning to the roofs where I can.
After just five more minutes, though, the buildings are no longer as intact. More and more live demons walk the streets, and the number of unbroken roofs that won’t shatter if I put a foot through them start growing vanishingly small.
I think that means I’m around where I want to be. It’s getting harder to see towards the city center because of the smoke rising up ahead of the river, but I’m much closer to the center than I was when I began.
I come to a stop after I Bloodstep to an isolated roof shorter than the others’ around it. I can’t tell what the original purpose of this place is—heavy corrugated steel has completely cut it off from the outside world.
Underneath it, three demons that resemble overly large ants that circle the steel, headbutting it at regular intervals. They’ve started to make an indent in it, curving the metal inwards. Soon enough, they’ll make it in.
I could not care less about the inhabitants of this building, but those demons represent enough XP to level me up and three souls that I can absorb to heal my own.
They either haven’t noticed me yet or have chosen to ignore me. The result is the same.
I wish I had a gun. I lost the only one I’ve ever used successfully back on the train, and I don’t think the general public has access to them, given the armaments I’ve seen others carry.
A dead woman’s bow and seven arrows in a threadbare quiver are all the ranged capacity I’ve got. Using a blood skill might be optimal, but I’ve seen that skills have failed on these things before. Thinking back to the lab, I remember the UCC guards there choosing to use guns or melee weapons rather than magic. It’s eminently possible that all demons have some level of innate skill resistance.
I try to pull on muscle memory for the first shot. The memories in my soul amalgam are helpful, but it’s not enough. When the researchers put me together, I doubt they were trying to have me win any archery competitions.
I breathe in deep, then half-exhale before firing.
My arrow isn’t completely on target, but it’s close enough. Each of the demons has three segments to its body, each segment possessing four separate spindly legs, and I clip one of them in the hind part.
Not enough force. The tip only penetrates an inch or two. Enough to piss it off, not enough to do any significant damage.
Its nails-against-chalkboard screech pierces the air, and all three ant-demons stop their swirling to produce the noise in tandem. The effect is so loud and so offputting that I stumble back. I think it’s supposed to make me nauseous, but it just keeps me off balance for a beat.
I take another shot with the bow, but my aim is off and it goes completely wide, clattering against scorched cobblestone.
Alright, that clearly isn’t working.
While I stand there pondering my options, the ant-demons stop their ghastly synchronized symphony and start climbing the structure I’m on.
Of course they can do that. When I look closer, I can see barbs on their legs, fine ones that look suited to hooking into little nooks and crannies to assist them in sticking to surfaces.
They also look suited to ripping flesh apart, but that much is obvious.
I look over the edge of the caged building I stand atop. It’s thirty feet to the ground, give or take a bit. The ant-demons are nearly perfectly in sync, each of them with eight limbs on the wall and four off. Twenty feet between me and the closest one, at a guess.
A step forward sends me plummeting. Applying Phantom Shape to create extra arms and legs helps me stay stable, adjusting myself with the wall.
I draw two daggers, one of them Sierra’s and the other the late Thief’s. Against an ant the size of a horse, it suddenly feels rather small.
Size matters less than lethality here, of course, so I drive both of them into what I think is the ant’s eyes.
Momentum carries me straight into it, and I grapple it with all of my ethereal arms and legs.
Red blood joins the black that I draw from its eyes. Its entire body is lined with tiny razors, cutting apart anything that dares to touch it.
Cutting me doesn’t stop me from carrying all my velocity into the impact, though, and it loses its grip on the wall, tumbling to the ground. I try to Woundshape, and to my surprise, it actually works. It’s not as effective as I would like—I can’t control where I’m mirroring the wound to—but it works.
Woundshape advanced to level 4!
Enhance Bleed is much the same. Weakened, but it works.
I draw both knives out of its eyes (?) and activate Soulknife, plunging the ruby-red blade into it. While it’s been getting increasingly costly to use, this weapon made short work of the first demons I eliminated.
It does not, unfortunately, have the same effect on the ant. Greyish-black blood sprays forth just like it would if I used a regular dagger, but it doesn’t do anything more. This skill is more for bypassing defenses and less for dealing massive damage. Got it.
I deactivate Soulknife before the ant-demon can break it and damage my soul further. Just knives it is, then.
The other two demons start clambering down from the building as I start wailing on their brethren, Knifefighting putting in work as it starts to attack back. I see where it’ll flail its legs in my mind’s eye, and I bat it away with Phantom Shaped limbs or my knife each time, getting in hit after hit after hit.
Knifefighting advanced to level 2!
The level of insight is increased, as is your damage.
I tear myself away from the ant-demon I’m assailing when I see the other two starting to pincer me from the corner of my eye, Bloodsteping upward when I realize that my clothes and flesh are caught on the thing’s barbed skin. Rather than returning to the top of the corrugated-metal cage, I only send myself up halfway, finding a handhold on the damaged wall.
For now, I drop the Phantom Shape
I’m preparing for my next wave of attacks when the earth starts to shake under the ant-demons. For a second, I ready myself for another wave of demons, but then I realize that this is no dark rift. The earth is just shaking, and the building I’m in is shaking with it.
Cracked cobblestone shatters further, and then flecks of stone rise. A moment later, they pelt the ant-demons at speed, chunks of flooring the size of my fist smashing straight through demonic chitin.
Magic. That’s an earth mage if I’ve ever seen one. That means humans in the area.
It’s not hard to spot them with the amount of destruction that’s rolled through the area. A group of them are sheltering behind the remnants of what appears to have been a florist’s boutique. Only half of a single wall is left standing, and I see six people crouching behind it from my elevated position.
All six of them are wearing the same uniform. I don’t recognize it, which means they’re probably not UCC personnel. Therefore, they’re probably from this city.
Which means that they’re former employees of the late Baron Raven. I’m suddenly glad that I turned Phantom Shape off.
While they’re busy destabilizing the foundations of the building I stand on, I Disguise Self. I assume that at least one of them’s already seen me, so I can’t make massive alterations to my physiology. I can, however, alter my facial structure, changing it to be more like Sapphire’s. I steal the eyes of one of the guards I killed at Outpost 17, replacing my signature red with soft green.
By the time the demons are dead, the six men and women have made it to the base of the building I’m still clinging onto. It’s at a dangerous tilt now, the sunken ground at an angle that barely keeps it upright.
“An adventurer,” I hear one of them mutter. “Of course.”
“Adventurer,” the man closest to me says. His voice is surprisingly mature. I can’t see his face under the featureless mask he wears, but he carries himself like a cocky young man, his voice belying that impresion. “Can you fight?”
I Appraise him, wondering if it’s worth just trying to kill the entire lot of them. It would bring me to nine of my ten required deaths, getting me that much closer to my goal, and I think I’d make it to level 10.
Name: Noren Foldwinter
Age: 61
Race: Human
Class: [APPRAISE FAILED]
Level: 37
Last Used Skill: [APPRAISE FAILED]
Oh.
Acting is going to have to put a lot of work in here, isn’t it.
“Yes,” I tell him.
“Then join us,” he says, pointing off towards the smoke that’s been obscuring my view of the city center, “or run for your life.”
Bloodstep makes me much faster than they can run, and a single usage of it no longer magically exhausts me, so I activate it immediately.
My first target is the Thief. All three of my enemies have basic classes, no evolutions to their name, but the Thief is one that may actually cause me irritation if I let him.
Thanks to my demonic body, I can see sharper in the dark, which has so far enabled me to keep a tab on him. If his Stealth trumps my ability to find him, though, he could get away and spread word about me.
I’m not entirely opposed to that—more adversity means more chances to level up—but I would prefer not to face the entire city at once.
He slinks through the shadows as if he’s already sure that he’s escaped.
I shatter that fantasy of his by appearing in front of him, Bloodstep outstripping his sprinting speed by far.
Silently, I stab forward with Phantom Shape. This skill is rather useful—I’d like to enhance it more, and that can only be done through constant use. I’m running close to the current 24-minute time limit, though, which is a bit disappointing.
The Thief manages to surprise me by avoiding my initial strike, ducking and weaving through the sharp segmented limbs with surprising speed. A skill of some kind?
If it’s magical, I can Siphon it, but his agility is enough that I might not actually be able to land a hand on him.
I still passively control the blood on the ground around us with Shape Blood, the magical investment low enough that I can have it on at all times. As such, I sense the disturbance that the female Archer makes when she finally catches sight of my new location.
One of them occupies my attention while the other prepares to attack. Were I a normal level 9 human with no class evolutions, I would be in real danger.
Unfortunately, I’m not a regular human.
Unfortunately for them, that is.
The streets are decorated with the results of battles past, and I draw on it, sending blood surging upwards to throw off the Archer’s vision and obstruct the Thief’s movements.
An arrow whistles towards me, undeterred by the blood, but I’m already moving, making use of the split-second distraction. It must’ve been fired off-center, aiming to not accidentally hit her teammate, since it only clips me instead of hitting me dead-on. That’s not enough to stop me.
The Thief’s suffered from blood hardening around his feet significantly more than the Archer has, and so he can’t stop me when I punch forward with my dagger, enveloping it in a Misty Blade.
Skill-enhanced steel parts leather and flesh alike as if it were warm butter, and I know from experience that Misty Blade is already killing him from the inside. Unlike me, he lacks Demonic Heritage and apparently also Pain Resistance, judging from his scream.
My second strike slits his throat.
Misty Blade advanced to level 4!
Bonus frost damage advances from 30% to 40% of an attack’s initial damage.
It’s not that useful of a skill, but I may as well seek to improve everything I can. It’s a shame that certain skills like Firearms aren’t feasible to level up right now while my Silver and Gold skills just aren’t really advancing. Perhaps I need to seek worthier opponents.
Objective: Reap the night
Targets killed: [2/10]
I’m moving before the dead man’s body even hits the ground. While Bloodstep is usable once more, I definitely don’t need to use it against a single enemy at this level.
That aside, there’s something else I want out of this fight.
The Archer nocks another arrow, and I meet her with a Blood Echo. She flinches back in fear as the scarlet duplicate of me surges forward, loosing her shot.
My Blood Echo makes herself tangible enough to catch the arrow in her chest, but of course a being made of blood isn’t even slowed by that. She raises the copy of my knife—and then she vanishes, her two seconds expired.
No level out of that. Shame.
As gallons of blood tumbles to the ground, I manipulate it with Shape Blood, catching the arrow Christine fired at me in the process.
I’m less than a second behind my copy, and I pick the arrow out of my mass of blood.
Rather than attack her with spears of sharpened blood, I simply throw nealry twenty gallons of it at her, deluging her with a torrent of the stuff. She falls screaming under the force of it, hitting the ground messily.
“What a shame,” I say, mirroring their earlier excuse to me. “Three Ravendale adventurers lost to the forces of demonic corruption.”
I kneel down next to her, prying one eye open with the blood on her face, and I shove her own arrow straight through it with enough force that it snaps.
She gurgles once and dies.
Objective: Reap the night
Targets killed: [3/10]
With the first part of my job done, I start on the messier part.
Devour granted +189 XP!
Temporary skill unlocked: Sharpshooter
When using this skill, you gain a 125% bonus to damage with ranged weapons. You are 80% less prone to distractions. Your accuracy is 10% better with ranged weapons.
Wow, this skill does a lot. While the skill heals me, stealing her vitality to replace what I lost, I kneel down and tear the bow from Christine’s cold hands, carefully extracting the quiver.
That’s when I notice that her body is dissolving. When I roll her over to take her arrows, the uneaten flesh on her back tears apart under my hands, soaking me in her blood. Her organs crumble away as the prone body falls on me, and her bones are starting to soften too.
I realize why when I look at the ground.
Even after death, the demonic blood refuses to stay still. It sticks to the Archer’s body, red human blood dissolving as the black fluid… saps it away?
As soon as I finish acquiring my new quiver, I look over to the other bodies. They look normal, but…
I walk over to the dead Warrior first. Sure enough, when I kick his eerily serene face, it crumples inwards as if there’s nothing but air inside him.
Despite my best efforts, Devour grants me nothing but the empty taste of ash.
It is, in retrospect, not something that should’ve surprised me. I doubt that I was the only one of the EVs to be created with the Devour skill, and I’ve never seen a human being with it. Though my sample size is still on the smaller end, that leads me to believe that it might be a trait inherent to demons.
If every demon is as hungry for advancement as I am, I can understand why even their blood saps away anything useful out of corpses.
Just to be sure, I check the Thief’s body too. A single kick has the corpse practically detonate like a rotten watermelon. No experience to be gained here either, and he’s freshly dead. I won’t be able to Devour anyone but the last person I kill if I ambush a group unless I store them far out of reach of any demonic influence—I’m sure any demons in the area would feast on these bodies if the blood didn’t get to it first. I
At least he has a couple of daggers I can take.
I have to wonder what the blood is doing with the drained bodies, along with why it didn’t immediately eat the demons I killed, but that’s less immediately relevant so I set it aside for the time being.
At level 1, Devour only gives me the temporary skill for a minute, so I make quick use of it, drawing and loosing an arrow, aiming for the Archer’s corpse’s head.
I miss, hitting the body in the shoulder instead. Fetid blood spews out of it, and I sling the bow over my shoulder, putting it away for the time being. I’ll focus on my priorities for now. The temporary usage of Sharpshooter isn’t going to make or break anything.
Three objectives are running at the same time, a record for me. The one that requires me to travel away from this nation isn’t achievable at this time (also, I don’t know how much I trust Saph, given that she clearly lied about not knowing me the first time she met me), so I need to focus on what I have.
Both of the two other active quests involve killing and/or eating things. That’s workable. My system doesn’t tell me how many demons I need to Devour, though I do have a quantitative answer for the “beings with levels”—seven more of those.
Speaking of which, the phrasing of that objective means that demons don’t have levels, unless I’m interpreting it wrong. That’s an interesting can of worms to open.
My plan remains unchanged. I’ll continue towards the city center until I feel satisfied or face foes that I have no hope of defeating.
And so I continue on, returning to the roofs where I can.
After just five more minutes, though, the buildings are no longer as intact. More and more live demons walk the streets, and the number of unbroken roofs that won’t shatter if I put a foot through them start growing vanishingly small.
I think that means I’m around where I want to be. It’s getting harder to see towards the city center because of the smoke rising up ahead of the river, but I’m much closer to the center than I was when I began.
I come to a stop after I Bloodstep to an isolated roof shorter than the others’ around it. I can’t tell what the original purpose of this place is—heavy corrugated steel has completely cut it off from the outside world.
Underneath it, three demons that resemble overly large ants that circle the steel, headbutting it at regular intervals. They’ve started to make an indent in it, curving the metal inwards. Soon enough, they’ll make it in.
I could not care less about the inhabitants of this building, but those demons represent enough XP to level me up and three souls that I can absorb to heal my own.
They either haven’t noticed me yet or have chosen to ignore me. The result is the same.
I wish I had a gun. I lost the only one I’ve ever used successfully back on the train, and I don’t think the general public has access to them, given the armaments I’ve seen others carry.
A dead woman’s bow and seven arrows in a threadbare quiver are all the ranged capacity I’ve got. Using a blood skill might be optimal, but I’ve seen that skills have failed on these things before. Thinking back to the lab, I remember the UCC guards there choosing to use guns or melee weapons rather than magic. It’s eminently possible that all demons have some level of innate skill resistance.
I try to pull on muscle memory for the first shot. The memories in my soul amalgam are helpful, but it’s not enough. When the researchers put me together, I doubt they were trying to have me win any archery competitions.
I breathe in deep, then half-exhale before firing.
My arrow isn’t completely on target, but it’s close enough. Each of the demons has three segments to its body, each segment possessing four separate spindly legs, and I clip one of them in the hind part.
Not enough force. The tip only penetrates an inch or two. Enough to piss it off, not enough to do any significant damage.
Its nails-against-chalkboard screech pierces the air, and all three ant-demons stop their swirling to produce the noise in tandem. The effect is so loud and so offputting that I stumble back. I think it’s supposed to make me nauseous, but it just keeps me off balance for a beat.
I take another shot with the bow, but my aim is off and it goes completely wide, clattering against scorched cobblestone.
Alright, that clearly isn’t working.
While I stand there pondering my options, the ant-demons stop their ghastly synchronized symphony and start climbing the structure I’m on.
Of course they can do that. When I look closer, I can see barbs on their legs, fine ones that look suited to hooking into little nooks and crannies to assist them in sticking to surfaces.
They also look suited to ripping flesh apart, but that much is obvious.
I look over the edge of the caged building I stand atop. It’s thirty feet to the ground, give or take a bit. The ant-demons are nearly perfectly in sync, each of them with eight limbs on the wall and four off. Twenty feet between me and the closest one, at a guess.
A step forward sends me plummeting. Applying Phantom Shape to create extra arms and legs helps me stay stable, adjusting myself with the wall.
I draw two daggers, one of them Sierra’s and the other the late Thief’s. Against an ant the size of a horse, it suddenly feels rather small.
Size matters less than lethality here, of course, so I drive both of them into what I think is the ant’s eyes.
Momentum carries me straight into it, and I grapple it with all of my ethereal arms and legs.
Red blood joins the black that I draw from its eyes. Its entire body is lined with tiny razors, cutting apart anything that dares to touch it.
Cutting me doesn’t stop me from carrying all my velocity into the impact, though, and it loses its grip on the wall, tumbling to the ground. I try to Woundshape, and to my surprise, it actually works. It’s not as effective as I would like—I can’t control where I’m mirroring the wound to—but it works.
Woundshape advanced to level 4!
Enhance Bleed is much the same. Weakened, but it works.
I draw both knives out of its eyes (?) and activate Soulknife, plunging the ruby-red blade into it. While it’s been getting increasingly costly to use, this weapon made short work of the first demons I eliminated.
It does not, unfortunately, have the same effect on the ant. Greyish-black blood sprays forth just like it would if I used a regular dagger, but it doesn’t do anything more. This skill is more for bypassing defenses and less for dealing massive damage. Got it.
I deactivate Soulknife before the ant-demon can break it and damage my soul further. Just knives it is, then.
The other two demons start clambering down from the building as I start wailing on their brethren, Knifefighting putting in work as it starts to attack back. I see where it’ll flail its legs in my mind’s eye, and I bat it away with Phantom Shaped limbs or my knife each time, getting in hit after hit after hit.
Knifefighting advanced to level 2!
The level of insight is increased, as is your damage.
I tear myself away from the ant-demon I’m assailing when I see the other two starting to pincer me from the corner of my eye, Bloodsteping upward when I realize that my clothes and flesh are caught on the thing’s barbed skin. Rather than returning to the top of the corrugated-metal cage, I only send myself up halfway, finding a handhold on the damaged wall.
For now, I drop the Phantom Shape
I’m preparing for my next wave of attacks when the earth starts to shake under the ant-demons. For a second, I ready myself for another wave of demons, but then I realize that this is no dark rift. The earth is just shaking, and the building I’m in is shaking with it.
Cracked cobblestone shatters further, and then flecks of stone rise. A moment later, they pelt the ant-demons at speed, chunks of flooring the size of my fist smashing straight through demonic chitin.
Magic. That’s an earth mage if I’ve ever seen one. That means humans in the area.
It’s not hard to spot them with the amount of destruction that’s rolled through the area. A group of them are sheltering behind the remnants of what appears to have been a florist’s boutique. Only half of a single wall is left standing, and I see six people crouching behind it from my elevated position.
All six of them are wearing the same uniform. I don’t recognize it, which means they’re probably not UCC personnel. Therefore, they’re probably from this city.
Which means that they’re former employees of the late Baron Raven. I’m suddenly glad that I turned Phantom Shape off.
While they’re busy destabilizing the foundations of the building I stand on, I Disguise Self. I assume that at least one of them’s already seen me, so I can’t make massive alterations to my physiology. I can, however, alter my facial structure, changing it to be more like Sapphire’s. I steal the eyes of one of the guards I killed at Outpost 17, replacing my signature red with soft green.
By the time the demons are dead, the six men and women have made it to the base of the building I’m still clinging onto. It’s at a dangerous tilt now, the sunken ground at an angle that barely keeps it upright.
“An adventurer,” I hear one of them mutter. “Of course.”
“Adventurer,” the man closest to me says. His voice is surprisingly mature. I can’t see his face under the featureless mask he wears, but he carries himself like a cocky young man, his voice belying that impresion. “Can you fight?”
I Appraise him, wondering if it’s worth just trying to kill the entire lot of them. It would bring me to nine of my ten required deaths, getting me that much closer to my goal, and I think I’d make it to level 10.
Name: Noren Foldwinter
Age: 61
Race: Human
Class: [APPRAISE FAILED]
Level: 37
Last Used Skill: [APPRAISE FAILED]
Oh.
Acting is going to have to put a lot of work in here, isn’t it.
“Yes,” I tell him.
“Then join us,” he says, pointing off towards the smoke that’s been obscuring my view of the city center, “or run for your life.”
