As it turns out, the only last words the bowman has to offer me consist of incoherent screaming.
I cock my head. “I haven’t even set you on fire yet.”
That seems to spark the bowman into action. He draws and fires in one quick motion, but Knifefighting is still active. It overlays phantom images of possible attacks he’ll make, but they all boil down to the same thing.
I bring my arm up as he looses the arrow. Despite my enhanced speed, I’m still not fast enough to parry arrows out of the air. I am, however, capable of predicting where they’ll go.
His arrow punches straight through flesh, muscle, and bone, carving a bloody trail straight through my arm.
It does not, however, have enough force to continue on. Nearly a third of the arrow sticks out of the exit wound, but my forearm catches the arrow before it can hit its target.
My opponent’s eyes widen in fear as I snap the shaft off and pull the arrow out by the bloody tip. It glows with some sort of magic, so I throw it off to one side before it can inflict me with plague or something.
I still lack a proper self-healing skill that works before I kill my enemy, but I don’t need one right now. I let the blood flow freely from the wound. The hole in my arm is large enough to stick a finger through, which means that I have plenty of material for Shape Blood.
Relentless is no longer active, which means that this fight is well within my means.
I Appraise my foe.
Name: Jonathan Wilcraft
Age: 25
Race: Human
Class: Arcane Archer
Level: 11
Last Used Skill: Surefire Shot
So he didn’t even use a skill to enhance the power of his arrow? Well, it’s possible he did, but I can only track the single most recently used skill.
It doesn’t matter. As he draws another arrow from his quiver, I summon a thin stream of wraithfire, sending it forth from my fingertip. It ignites the air lazily, and though it’s a force of nature that’s under my control, I somehow get the impression that my flame exudes arrogance in its pace.
I stop dwelling on it when Jonathan starts screaming. The second arrow he looses goes wide, his Surefire Shot apparently not enough to stabilize him when his bow is on fire.
Okay, his arm is also on fire. As is his torso, now. Aaaaand that’s his head.
I saunter over, stepping over a charred, burning corpse, and I rip his throat out with my teeth.
Devour granted +191 XP!
Temporary skill unlocked: Surefire Shot
If you are physically capable, your next shot with a ranged weapon will land.
There could be some use to this, though I only have a minute left.
There’s demon blood on the ground, and I remember what that means. It might already be too late for me to Devour the others’ corpses.
As it turns out, the blowgun-woman’s corpse has already started hollowing out, her essence dissolving into the demon blood that stains the dirt beneath my feet black. I try Devouring her, but I only get scraps.
Devour granted +11 XP!
Temporary skill unlocked: Dart Amplification
The next projectile you fire will grow stronger the smaller it is, up to a 400% increase in power.
I raise an eyebrow. Eating the hollowed-out bodies is still possible as long as it’s not long after I kill them, then.
The spearman that I killed first hasn’t actually been touched by the blood. There’s not much flesh left on his still-burning bones, though. He was standing close enough to the epicenter of my Wraithfire that I doubt there’s much soul to Devour either.
I still bite into the charred flesh. It tastes of iron and flame.
Devour granted +59 XP!
Temporary skill unlocked: Shieldbreaker
Enchant the weapon you are holding. For the next five minutes, it will do 500% more damage to shields.
These people do have strong skills, as it turns out, though they do all sound a little basic. None of them provide bonuses to perception like my Silver-tier Knifefighting does—it’s all simple multipliers to damage. Nothing they have is even in the same league as Siphon or Devour.
I think I can see why Sierra thinks so highly of me.
With my three targets dead, I look around to assess the situation.
Adrian’s killed his first target. His enemy lies facedown, their own sword impaling them to the blood-doused ground below. Blood trickles down the side of his face. I’m not sure if that’s his or his enemy’s.
In the time since, we’ve attracted more attention. Now, the Warrior fends off two at once, both of them wearing the Baron’s colors. Late reinforcements? Another group, perhaps?
At any rate, he doesn’t seem to be struggling, so I look up, where the real fight is likely taking place.
Sierra’s plan to isolate Noren was largely conjecture. Apparently, the man’s real secretive about his powers outside of combat, so all Sierra is operating off right now is guesswork.
I do approve of the idea of separating an earth mage from his element, but Noren seems to be holding his own up there. Sierra floats a hundred feet above us, buoyed by her telekinesis. As I watch, she pops another one of her marbles, and a translucent wall of force appears below her just in time to dodge a hailstorm of rocks.
Sierra’s not entirely passive. Royal blue tendrils of force extend forth from her free hand, linking to Noren’s joints. The level 37 mage is struggling to move, but his magic operates freely. Both of them are wounded—Sierra’s taken a glancing hit to the shoulder, while Noren’s face has been lacerated multiple times.
At first glance, it’s easy to believe Sierra is winning, but I know her capabilities. She’s running out of marbles, and those force tendrils can’t be easy to sustain. From the number of spells she pre-prepared, she only has two or three minutes before she starts running out.
Noren has to know this. He’s far too calm for a man in mortal danger right now, which means he knows he’s going to start winning.
I’m not going to lose a valuable ally like this.
Despite all the improvements I’ve made to it, Bloodstep still doesn’t move me further than thirty feet, and I don’t think chaining four of these in a row is doable for me, even if I Siphon my own Wraithfire to do so.
But I do have three temporary skills, and there’s an awful lot of equipment on the ground here.
I scamper around the bodies, leaving Adrian to fight on his own for now, and I locate Jonathan’s still-burning bow. When I try to pick it up, it crumples under my touch.
The spearman has nothing of worth. His entire body is a bloody black char.
The woman, though, has a blowgun strapped to her that she accidentally protected with her life. I slice it off with my knife, feeling its weight in my hands. Not my preferred weapon, but I’ll have to make do.
She has a package of darts, too, but almost all of them are molten, the wraithfire around us enough to twist their metallic form.
There’s only two intact darts deep within the package, but that’s fine. I can only use one, anyway.
I load the dart into the blowgun quickly but methodically, muscle memory from lives never lived assisting me in the process, and I bring it to my lips.
The blowgun’s been warped by the flame, too, but it’s not destroyed beyond use, and that’s all I need. The dart slips back in the pipe until I can hold its feathered shaft between my teeth, which I do for long enough to cast Shieldbreaker on the dart. It glows with heat, warming my mouth where it contacts it. Compared to wraithfire, it’s nothing, but it’s reassuring to know that the skill’s working.
Dart Amplification is next, and that one is significantly less flashy. I don’t feel any change in my body or the weapon I’m about to wield.
Finally, I activate my stolen Surefire Shot, focusing the entirety of my mind on my target.
I raise the blowgun until it’s nearly vertical, skills and amalgam-memories guiding me, and I blow.
My lungs are significantly more developed than a human’s, and I don’t only have one set. When I blow, the dart flies out so fast that it could be mistaken for a bullet.
For an agonizingly long quarter of a second, I watch the tiny glowing dart trace its path against the darkening night, and then Surefire Shot proves its name to be true. I can’t sense blood from this far, but I can see it spray out from where the dart punches through Noren’s armor. With my enhanced vision, I can make out his grimace of pain from here.
Noren opens his mouth, ready to cast a grand working of some kind or another, and Sierra pops another marble, taking advantage of the momentary distraction to stab forth with piercing light. She can’t have more than two or three of those left.
I don’t need enhanced hearing to catch what happens next.
Just as she prepares her killing blow, the air screams as if it’s being torn apart.
Unfortunately, it’s not so simple as that.
Both Noren and Sierra lose the spells they were forming, the two of them knocked off balance a hundred feet above us as the next wave of demon-seeds begin to fall. Sierra has to cancel her force-tendrils in favor of a flight skill when a blossoming seed the size of a train car nearly flattens her on its way down.
Noren doesn’t pursue her, choosing instead to fall back to the ground and let it swallow him up. I hear startled yelps at regular intervals around me, and I catch someone drop into the ground in the corner of my eye.
The earth sucks at my feet, too, trapping me like quicksand, and I Bloodstep away immediately.
Bloodstep advanced to level 10!
You now ignore all size constraints. You can now travel up to 50 feet from your starting location.
I reappear inside a collapsing building, cowering in what remains of its second floor. I am no longer making contact with the earth.
Why didn’t he use that earlier?
Actually, that might’ve been his first opportunity to use it. When he first started fighting me, we were over the water, and when he found me again, I was with Sierra inside a protective bubble. This is the first point in the fight where he’s not otherwise occupied in a one-on-one and has had the opportunity to do something large-scale.
Whistling air cuts off my thoughts as a demon-seed half again my height and twice my width shears straight through the brick not ten feet from me, smashing through two stories of ruins before sinking into the earth.
It sprouts from its shell before Noren’s mass working can drag it beneath the ground, and to my surprise, it reveals two dozen separate spindly legs, each of them gripping onto something other than the ground. A centipede with the body of a horse, it appears. Slightly disturbing.
I burn it with Wraithfire. The soul-devouring flame catches less easily than I’d like. Was this demon born with Wraithfire Resistance?
It’s a moot point, because I pounce on it a moment later, careful not to touch the ground. It tries to buck me off and grab me with a dozen limbs at once, and I hang onto it, allowing its centipede-limbs to grasp onto my body.
In exchange, I stab it three times, applying every skill I can to make it maximally effective.
Enhance Bleed advanced to level 6!
Woundshape advanced to level 6!
Something’s different about this wave. Whereas the last one felt malicious enough, this demon registers differently to my senses. Even as I hack, slash, and burn its life away, something about it feels more dangerous. Even after it stops moving and I start eating it, a feeling deep in my gut tells me that there’s something wrong.
Devour granted +23 XP!
Objective: Restore your soul
Targets devoured: [12/???]
That objective still won’t tell me what I’ll be awarded for accomplishing it. Irritating. The fact that the XP reward is so low doesn’t help with that, either.
“Evelyn!” I hear Sierra shout. I bounce from half-eaten corpse to wall to caved-in roof, making my way to open air in a matter of moments.
The Blue Mage carries Adrian in her arms, telekinesis supporting her but not her charge. She slows to a stop next to me and deposits the Warrior down on the roof next to me. Her hands are empty. No marbles.
Adrian wipes his bloodstained blade off on his leathers, breathing heavily. “I’m going to fucking uncloak, Sierra. I can’t handle this shit anymore. That has to be a stage two, now.”
Sierra looks askance at him, her face falling. “You know what that’ll mean, right?”
“I leveled up,” Adrian says. “I finished a quest that should’ve been godsdamned impossible, and now I’m a level 8 Warrior. Against trash like the men we’re up against? Sure. Against that?”
He gestures up towards the tree, his statement punctuated by the staccato thump of bodies hitting the ground. I hear screaming every now and then, but it’s getting less frequent.
The survivors are dying.
“Can you not run?” I ask. “I don’t know why you have any investment in Ravendale. Why stay?”
“Can’t,” Sierra grimaces. “Watch.”
She reaches behind her back, and her hand disappears. A moment later, it appears again, carrying an ornate five-foot staff with a blue jewel inset into it.
“My magical focus,” she explains. “It’s technically within the rules, but I didn’t really want to—“
Another demon-seed sails towards us, one of the hundred still falling, and Sierra cuts herself off to shout an incantation. The jewel at the head of the staff glows, and a beam of light streams forth from the end of her focus. It lances through the fleshy seed. Sierra’s eyes glow with the beam as she shifts the staff, moving the elongated light-lance, and the seed splits into two.
When it fades, Sierra grimaces. “That was a waste of a charge.”
She points the staff upwards once more, and this time a weaker beam shoots out of it, paler and thinner and slower. Inferior in every way to the last skill—presumably, this is the same act of magic, just without “expending a charge.”
It soars straight and true nonetheless. I watch as the thin beam illuminates the night around it, climbing a hundred feet, two hundred, three hundred—and then it stops.
Three hundred feet out, an oil-slick iris of color radiates out in the air, spreading maybe ten feet before it dissipates. When it disappears, Sierra’s magic is gone as well.
“Aunt Marie,” Sierra explains, displeased, “has politely informed us that the UCC staff in this area are too weak to make a difference.”
“It’s up to us to kill this godsdamned thing,” Adrian says. “And that’s not going to be easy.”
Sierra sneers. “If we choose to retreat, Marie will annihilate it herself.”
“So why don’t you?” I ask.
“Retreat means failure,” Adrian says in the tone of a man who’s repeated himself one too many times. “Uncloaking means admitting weakness, which is not quite defeat, but close enough. It’s less bad, and I fucking need it. At least your cloaked class is usable.”
They’re disclosing an awful lot of information about themselves. Do they trust me that much, or are they prepared to silence me?
“Then uncloak,” Sierra grimaces, conceding the point. “I agree. You are—“
The ground beneath us erupts, and every single person, demon, and ruin that Noren’s magic swallowed is vomited right back at us.
Adrian curses as Sierra casts, a blue disc forming under our feet and lifting us fast enough to avoid the worst of the barrage.
She’s not unstoppable, that much is becoming clear. Her disc is far slower than her telekinesis was earlier. I assume she’s run out of the resource that allows her to use the latter skill. Magical exertion has thrown a sheen of sweat across her face, and her brow creases as she casts.
Noren shoots forth from the ground, practically totally cloaked in earth.
I immediately reply with Wraithfire, taking care not to accidentally kill my two allies, and Noren blocks it with half of a house. The house catches fire, but he doesn’t.
“Fuck,” Adrian grunts, letting out a pained gasp.
I don’t need to look at him to sense the blood spilling from his arm. He dodged the worst of the attack, but his sword arm is bleeding where Noren’s stone spears struck it.
He raises his arm, then drops it. The sword clatters to the disc beneath our feet, and he crouches to pick it up with his off hand.
Adrian’s not going to be able to handle this. Briefly, I wonder whether I should just let him die, but something tells me that Sierra might not take kindly to that.
Besides, I have the feeling that the extent of his power doesn’t end at a few simple sword swings.
“Can’t—can’t do this anymore,” he mutters, nearly dropping his sword. “I have to uncloak.”
“Then do it,” Sierra hisses, throwing herself to one side as Noren summons spikes the size of buildings from the ground beneath us. Arrows and darts fly towards us, courtesy of the others that’ve come up, but those aren’t our primary focus. Besides, they have the demons on the ground to worry about.
I can’t see where Noren is, though a quick Locate Person reveals his current location to be nearly fifty feet under us. A growing sphere of dirt and stone and brick and steel obscures him from sight.
Adrian sighs. It’s a defeated sound, which is about what I expect from him.
What I don’t expect quite as much is how his blade lights up a deep, rich blue, far darker than Sierra’s.
He points his sword downwards, and a droplet of water forms at its tip. I’m about to ask what he plans to do with a single raindrop when that tiny bit of water explodes forwards, multiplying ten-thousandfold as it explodes into a torrent of water as powerful as anything the river had to offer.
His flood meets Noren’s sphere of earth, and it explodes into mud, his deluge flooding the sphere and chipping away at it like the river to a particularly weak stone. Within seconds, the structure destabilizes, enough of it dissolving into liquid that Noren can no longer control it.
When the water suddenly tapers off, Adrian is breathing hard.
“No going back now,” Sierra says. She sounds… empty. Defeated, just like Adrian. “That’s the line crossed. There is nothing more for you to gain here.”
“Sorry,” Adrian grunts.
“I may still advance against this Earth Mage,” Sierra says. “Attack the tree. Stay out of our way.”
Adrian nods silently, then dissolves into a puddle.
It says something about the events of the last minute that this completely fails to surprise me.
“He’ll be fine,” Sierra says. “I apologize, Evelyn. I doubt you were expecting this.”
“Very few things have gone as expected,” I say. “Come. We have a mage to slay.”
I nearly get a spike in my chest for daring to speak too long, Noren’s favored attack freezing in midair when Sierra withdraws a marble from a hidden pocket and pops it, creating another shield.
“That was my last one,” Sierra says. “From here, we improvise.”
Improvise.
“Keep flying,” I tell her. “I’ll find my own way against him. Save your strength.”
She nods, preparing to cast once more, and the disc I’m standing on fades away.
I Bloodstep immediately, ensuring I stay in the air, and I trail Wraithfire, pouring soul-devouring flame down onto my enemy.
Where it lands, it kills. People and demons alike writhe and die under the sheer power of my special skill on the ground. A demon-seed explodes into fire as it passes through the burning air. It’s dead before it can make landfall.
And yet Noren is still alive. Even as I pour everything I have into the skill, even as I set the entire ruin of a city aflame, Noren lives, dodging and weaving and blocking my attacks. None of his shields hold, but he always has more.
And then I’m falling. I still have no mobility other than Bloodstep, and I prepare to use it again—and I’m stopped by the sudden appearance of a deadly sharp rock in my gut.
Even as I’m freely plummeting towards the ground, ready to meet a fiery grave while impaled on my enemy’s weapon, I smile.
“Wrong place, motherfucker,” I say, and I Siphon away his attack.
Sharp stone crumbles away into dust, and magic surges through my veins. The sudden burst of power I get from draining his power is more than enough for me to Bloodstep once more, bleeding as I am. I reappear in the air once more, exhausted but not depleted enough to stop. I use Shape Blood to help me, covering myself in my own bood and influencing the direction of my fall.
I activate Bloodstep again.
Bloodstep advanced from Bronze to Silver!
Bloodstep (Silver) and Blood Surge (Bronze) are compatible skills!
Bloodstep (Silver) and Blood Surge (Bronze) have been consumed.
New skill unlocked: Bloodpath
Bloodpath (Rare)
Tier: Silver
Level: 2
You can enter a blood-state where you can freely travel so long as you can manipulate blood. While in this state, you ignore movement restrictions, and your strength increases by 20%. Consumes blood as well as mana.
According to Locate Person, I’m over a hundred feet from his location. I know he can’t hear me over the whistling demon-seeds, over the screaming corpses that don’t know they’re dead yet, over his own magic.
But I whisper my oath anyway.
“I’m coming for you.”
As it turns out, the only last words the bowman has to offer me consist of incoherent screaming.
I cock my head. “I haven’t even set you on fire yet.”
That seems to spark the bowman into action. He draws and fires in one quick motion, but Knifefighting is still active. It overlays phantom images of possible attacks he’ll make, but they all boil down to the same thing.
I bring my arm up as he looses the arrow. Despite my enhanced speed, I’m still not fast enough to parry arrows out of the air. I am, however, capable of predicting where they’ll go.
His arrow punches straight through flesh, muscle, and bone, carving a bloody trail straight through my arm.
It does not, however, have enough force to continue on. Nearly a third of the arrow sticks out of the exit wound, but my forearm catches the arrow before it can hit its target.
My opponent’s eyes widen in fear as I snap the shaft off and pull the arrow out by the bloody tip. It glows with some sort of magic, so I throw it off to one side before it can inflict me with plague or something.
I still lack a proper self-healing skill that works before I kill my enemy, but I don’t need one right now. I let the blood flow freely from the wound. The hole in my arm is large enough to stick a finger through, which means that I have plenty of material for Shape Blood.
Relentless is no longer active, which means that this fight is well within my means.
I Appraise my foe.
Name: Jonathan Wilcraft
Age: 25
Race: Human
Class: Arcane Archer
Level: 11
Last Used Skill: Surefire Shot
So he didn’t even use a skill to enhance the power of his arrow? Well, it’s possible he did, but I can only track the single most recently used skill.
It doesn’t matter. As he draws another arrow from his quiver, I summon a thin stream of wraithfire, sending it forth from my fingertip. It ignites the air lazily, and though it’s a force of nature that’s under my control, I somehow get the impression that my flame exudes arrogance in its pace.
I stop dwelling on it when Jonathan starts screaming. The second arrow he looses goes wide, his Surefire Shot apparently not enough to stabilize him when his bow is on fire.
Okay, his arm is also on fire. As is his torso, now. Aaaaand that’s his head.
I saunter over, stepping over a charred, burning corpse, and I rip his throat out with my teeth.
Devour granted +191 XP!
Temporary skill unlocked: Surefire Shot
If you are physically capable, your next shot with a ranged weapon will land.
There could be some use to this, though I only have a minute left.
There’s demon blood on the ground, and I remember what that means. It might already be too late for me to Devour the others’ corpses.
As it turns out, the blowgun-woman’s corpse has already started hollowing out, her essence dissolving into the demon blood that stains the dirt beneath my feet black. I try Devouring her, but I only get scraps.
Devour granted +11 XP!
Temporary skill unlocked: Dart Amplification
The next projectile you fire will grow stronger the smaller it is, up to a 400% increase in power.
I raise an eyebrow. Eating the hollowed-out bodies is still possible as long as it’s not long after I kill them, then.
The spearman that I killed first hasn’t actually been touched by the blood. There’s not much flesh left on his still-burning bones, though. He was standing close enough to the epicenter of my Wraithfire that I doubt there’s much soul to Devour either.
I still bite into the charred flesh. It tastes of iron and flame.
Devour granted +59 XP!
Temporary skill unlocked: Shieldbreaker
Enchant the weapon you are holding. For the next five minutes, it will do 500% more damage to shields.
These people do have strong skills, as it turns out, though they do all sound a little basic. None of them provide bonuses to perception like my Silver-tier Knifefighting does—it’s all simple multipliers to damage. Nothing they have is even in the same league as Siphon or Devour.
I think I can see why Sierra thinks so highly of me.
With my three targets dead, I look around to assess the situation.
Adrian’s killed his first target. His enemy lies facedown, their own sword impaling them to the blood-doused ground below. Blood trickles down the side of his face. I’m not sure if that’s his or his enemy’s.
In the time since, we’ve attracted more attention. Now, the Warrior fends off two at once, both of them wearing the Baron’s colors. Late reinforcements? Another group, perhaps?
At any rate, he doesn’t seem to be struggling, so I look up, where the real fight is likely taking place.
Sierra’s plan to isolate Noren was largely conjecture. Apparently, the man’s real secretive about his powers outside of combat, so all Sierra is operating off right now is guesswork.
I do approve of the idea of separating an earth mage from his element, but Noren seems to be holding his own up there. Sierra floats a hundred feet above us, buoyed by her telekinesis. As I watch, she pops another one of her marbles, and a translucent wall of force appears below her just in time to dodge a hailstorm of rocks.
Sierra’s not entirely passive. Royal blue tendrils of force extend forth from her free hand, linking to Noren’s joints. The level 37 mage is struggling to move, but his magic operates freely. Both of them are wounded—Sierra’s taken a glancing hit to the shoulder, while Noren’s face has been lacerated multiple times.
At first glance, it’s easy to believe Sierra is winning, but I know her capabilities. She’s running out of marbles, and those force tendrils can’t be easy to sustain. From the number of spells she pre-prepared, she only has two or three minutes before she starts running out.
Noren has to know this. He’s far too calm for a man in mortal danger right now, which means he knows he’s going to start winning.
I’m not going to lose a valuable ally like this.
Despite all the improvements I’ve made to it, Bloodstep still doesn’t move me further than thirty feet, and I don’t think chaining four of these in a row is doable for me, even if I Siphon my own Wraithfire to do so.
But I do have three temporary skills, and there’s an awful lot of equipment on the ground here.
I scamper around the bodies, leaving Adrian to fight on his own for now, and I locate Jonathan’s still-burning bow. When I try to pick it up, it crumples under my touch.
The spearman has nothing of worth. His entire body is a bloody black char.
The woman, though, has a blowgun strapped to her that she accidentally protected with her life. I slice it off with my knife, feeling its weight in my hands. Not my preferred weapon, but I’ll have to make do.
She has a package of darts, too, but almost all of them are molten, the wraithfire around us enough to twist their metallic form.
There’s only two intact darts deep within the package, but that’s fine. I can only use one, anyway.
I load the dart into the blowgun quickly but methodically, muscle memory from lives never lived assisting me in the process, and I bring it to my lips.
The blowgun’s been warped by the flame, too, but it’s not destroyed beyond use, and that’s all I need. The dart slips back in the pipe until I can hold its feathered shaft between my teeth, which I do for long enough to cast Shieldbreaker on the dart. It glows with heat, warming my mouth where it contacts it. Compared to wraithfire, it’s nothing, but it’s reassuring to know that the skill’s working.
Dart Amplification is next, and that one is significantly less flashy. I don’t feel any change in my body or the weapon I’m about to wield.
Finally, I activate my stolen Surefire Shot, focusing the entirety of my mind on my target.
I raise the blowgun until it’s nearly vertical, skills and amalgam-memories guiding me, and I blow.
My lungs are significantly more developed than a human’s, and I don’t only have one set. When I blow, the dart flies out so fast that it could be mistaken for a bullet.
For an agonizingly long quarter of a second, I watch the tiny glowing dart trace its path against the darkening night, and then Surefire Shot proves its name to be true. I can’t sense blood from this far, but I can see it spray out from where the dart punches through Noren’s armor. With my enhanced vision, I can make out his grimace of pain from here.
Noren opens his mouth, ready to cast a grand working of some kind or another, and Sierra pops another marble, taking advantage of the momentary distraction to stab forth with piercing light. She can’t have more than two or three of those left.
I don’t need enhanced hearing to catch what happens next.
Just as she prepares her killing blow, the air screams as if it’s being torn apart.
Unfortunately, it’s not so simple as that.
Both Noren and Sierra lose the spells they were forming, the two of them knocked off balance a hundred feet above us as the next wave of demon-seeds begin to fall. Sierra has to cancel her force-tendrils in favor of a flight skill when a blossoming seed the size of a train car nearly flattens her on its way down.
Noren doesn’t pursue her, choosing instead to fall back to the ground and let it swallow him up. I hear startled yelps at regular intervals around me, and I catch someone drop into the ground in the corner of my eye.
The earth sucks at my feet, too, trapping me like quicksand, and I Bloodstep away immediately.
Bloodstep advanced to level 10!
You now ignore all size constraints. You can now travel up to 50 feet from your starting location.
I reappear inside a collapsing building, cowering in what remains of its second floor. I am no longer making contact with the earth.
Why didn’t he use that earlier?
Actually, that might’ve been his first opportunity to use it. When he first started fighting me, we were over the water, and when he found me again, I was with Sierra inside a protective bubble. This is the first point in the fight where he’s not otherwise occupied in a one-on-one and has had the opportunity to do something large-scale.
Whistling air cuts off my thoughts as a demon-seed half again my height and twice my width shears straight through the brick not ten feet from me, smashing through two stories of ruins before sinking into the earth.
It sprouts from its shell before Noren’s mass working can drag it beneath the ground, and to my surprise, it reveals two dozen separate spindly legs, each of them gripping onto something other than the ground. A centipede with the body of a horse, it appears. Slightly disturbing.
I burn it with Wraithfire. The soul-devouring flame catches less easily than I’d like. Was this demon born with Wraithfire Resistance?
It’s a moot point, because I pounce on it a moment later, careful not to touch the ground. It tries to buck me off and grab me with a dozen limbs at once, and I hang onto it, allowing its centipede-limbs to grasp onto my body.
In exchange, I stab it three times, applying every skill I can to make it maximally effective.
Enhance Bleed advanced to level 6!
Woundshape advanced to level 6!
Something’s different about this wave. Whereas the last one felt malicious enough, this demon registers differently to my senses. Even as I hack, slash, and burn its life away, something about it feels more dangerous. Even after it stops moving and I start eating it, a feeling deep in my gut tells me that there’s something wrong.
Devour granted +23 XP!
Objective: Restore your soul
Targets devoured: [12/???]
That objective still won’t tell me what I’ll be awarded for accomplishing it. Irritating. The fact that the XP reward is so low doesn’t help with that, either.
“Evelyn!” I hear Sierra shout. I bounce from half-eaten corpse to wall to caved-in roof, making my way to open air in a matter of moments.
The Blue Mage carries Adrian in her arms, telekinesis supporting her but not her charge. She slows to a stop next to me and deposits the Warrior down on the roof next to me. Her hands are empty. No marbles.
Adrian wipes his bloodstained blade off on his leathers, breathing heavily. “I’m going to fucking uncloak, Sierra. I can’t handle this shit anymore. That has to be a stage two, now.”
Sierra looks askance at him, her face falling. “You know what that’ll mean, right?”
“I leveled up,” Adrian says. “I finished a quest that should’ve been godsdamned impossible, and now I’m a level 8 Warrior. Against trash like the men we’re up against? Sure. Against that?”
He gestures up towards the tree, his statement punctuated by the staccato thump of bodies hitting the ground. I hear screaming every now and then, but it’s getting less frequent.
The survivors are dying.
“Can you not run?” I ask. “I don’t know why you have any investment in Ravendale. Why stay?”
“Can’t,” Sierra grimaces. “Watch.”
She reaches behind her back, and her hand disappears. A moment later, it appears again, carrying an ornate five-foot staff with a blue jewel inset into it.
“My magical focus,” she explains. “It’s technically within the rules, but I didn’t really want to—“
Another demon-seed sails towards us, one of the hundred still falling, and Sierra cuts herself off to shout an incantation. The jewel at the head of the staff glows, and a beam of light streams forth from the end of her focus. It lances through the fleshy seed. Sierra’s eyes glow with the beam as she shifts the staff, moving the elongated light-lance, and the seed splits into two.
When it fades, Sierra grimaces. “That was a waste of a charge.”
She points the staff upwards once more, and this time a weaker beam shoots out of it, paler and thinner and slower. Inferior in every way to the last skill—presumably, this is the same act of magic, just without “expending a charge.”
It soars straight and true nonetheless. I watch as the thin beam illuminates the night around it, climbing a hundred feet, two hundred, three hundred—and then it stops.
Three hundred feet out, an oil-slick iris of color radiates out in the air, spreading maybe ten feet before it dissipates. When it disappears, Sierra’s magic is gone as well.
“Aunt Marie,” Sierra explains, displeased, “has politely informed us that the UCC staff in this area are too weak to make a difference.”
“It’s up to us to kill this godsdamned thing,” Adrian says. “And that’s not going to be easy.”
Sierra sneers. “If we choose to retreat, Marie will annihilate it herself.”
“So why don’t you?” I ask.
“Retreat means failure,” Adrian says in the tone of a man who’s repeated himself one too many times. “Uncloaking means admitting weakness, which is not quite defeat, but close enough. It’s less bad, and I fucking need it. At least your cloaked class is usable.”
They’re disclosing an awful lot of information about themselves. Do they trust me that much, or are they prepared to silence me?
“Then uncloak,” Sierra grimaces, conceding the point. “I agree. You are—“
The ground beneath us erupts, and every single person, demon, and ruin that Noren’s magic swallowed is vomited right back at us.
Adrian curses as Sierra casts, a blue disc forming under our feet and lifting us fast enough to avoid the worst of the barrage.
She’s not unstoppable, that much is becoming clear. Her disc is far slower than her telekinesis was earlier. I assume she’s run out of the resource that allows her to use the latter skill. Magical exertion has thrown a sheen of sweat across her face, and her brow creases as she casts.
Noren shoots forth from the ground, practically totally cloaked in earth.
I immediately reply with Wraithfire, taking care not to accidentally kill my two allies, and Noren blocks it with half of a house. The house catches fire, but he doesn’t.
“Fuck,” Adrian grunts, letting out a pained gasp.
I don’t need to look at him to sense the blood spilling from his arm. He dodged the worst of the attack, but his sword arm is bleeding where Noren’s stone spears struck it.
He raises his arm, then drops it. The sword clatters to the disc beneath our feet, and he crouches to pick it up with his off hand.
Adrian’s not going to be able to handle this. Briefly, I wonder whether I should just let him die, but something tells me that Sierra might not take kindly to that.
Besides, I have the feeling that the extent of his power doesn’t end at a few simple sword swings.
“Can’t—can’t do this anymore,” he mutters, nearly dropping his sword. “I have to uncloak.”
“Then do it,” Sierra hisses, throwing herself to one side as Noren summons spikes the size of buildings from the ground beneath us. Arrows and darts fly towards us, courtesy of the others that’ve come up, but those aren’t our primary focus. Besides, they have the demons on the ground to worry about.
I can’t see where Noren is, though a quick Locate Person reveals his current location to be nearly fifty feet under us. A growing sphere of dirt and stone and brick and steel obscures him from sight.
Adrian sighs. It’s a defeated sound, which is about what I expect from him.
What I don’t expect quite as much is how his blade lights up a deep, rich blue, far darker than Sierra’s.
He points his sword downwards, and a droplet of water forms at its tip. I’m about to ask what he plans to do with a single raindrop when that tiny bit of water explodes forwards, multiplying ten-thousandfold as it explodes into a torrent of water as powerful as anything the river had to offer.
His flood meets Noren’s sphere of earth, and it explodes into mud, his deluge flooding the sphere and chipping away at it like the river to a particularly weak stone. Within seconds, the structure destabilizes, enough of it dissolving into liquid that Noren can no longer control it.
When the water suddenly tapers off, Adrian is breathing hard.
“No going back now,” Sierra says. She sounds… empty. Defeated, just like Adrian. “That’s the line crossed. There is nothing more for you to gain here.”
“Sorry,” Adrian grunts.
“I may still advance against this Earth Mage,” Sierra says. “Attack the tree. Stay out of our way.”
Adrian nods silently, then dissolves into a puddle.
It says something about the events of the last minute that this completely fails to surprise me.
“He’ll be fine,” Sierra says. “I apologize, Evelyn. I doubt you were expecting this.”
“Very few things have gone as expected,” I say. “Come. We have a mage to slay.”
I nearly get a spike in my chest for daring to speak too long, Noren’s favored attack freezing in midair when Sierra withdraws a marble from a hidden pocket and pops it, creating another shield.
“That was my last one,” Sierra says. “From here, we improvise.”
Improvise.
“Keep flying,” I tell her. “I’ll find my own way against him. Save your strength.”
She nods, preparing to cast once more, and the disc I’m standing on fades away.
I Bloodstep immediately, ensuring I stay in the air, and I trail Wraithfire, pouring soul-devouring flame down onto my enemy.
Where it lands, it kills. People and demons alike writhe and die under the sheer power of my special skill on the ground. A demon-seed explodes into fire as it passes through the burning air. It’s dead before it can make landfall.
And yet Noren is still alive. Even as I pour everything I have into the skill, even as I set the entire ruin of a city aflame, Noren lives, dodging and weaving and blocking my attacks. None of his shields hold, but he always has more.
And then I’m falling. I still have no mobility other than Bloodstep, and I prepare to use it again—and I’m stopped by the sudden appearance of a deadly sharp rock in my gut.
Even as I’m freely plummeting towards the ground, ready to meet a fiery grave while impaled on my enemy’s weapon, I smile.
“Wrong place, motherfucker,” I say, and I Siphon away his attack.
Sharp stone crumbles away into dust, and magic surges through my veins. The sudden burst of power I get from draining his power is more than enough for me to Bloodstep once more, bleeding as I am. I reappear in the air once more, exhausted but not depleted enough to stop. I use Shape Blood to help me, covering myself in my own bood and influencing the direction of my fall.
I activate Bloodstep again.
Bloodstep advanced from Bronze to Silver!
Bloodstep (Silver) and Blood Surge (Bronze) are compatible skills!
Bloodstep (Silver) and Blood Surge (Bronze) have been consumed.
New skill unlocked: Bloodpath
Bloodpath (Rare)
Tier: Silver
Level: 2
You can enter a blood-state where you can freely travel so long as you can manipulate blood. While in this state, you ignore movement restrictions, and your strength increases by 20%. Consumes blood as well as mana.
According to Locate Person, I’m over a hundred feet from his location. I know he can’t hear me over the whistling demon-seeds, over the screaming corpses that don’t know they’re dead yet, over his own magic.
But I whisper my oath anyway.
“I’m coming for you.”
