Zoe stopped making any effort to conceal her horns, claws, or eyes. It felt rather pointless at this stage of things, and she really didn’t need the constant strain on her spirit. Besides, it’s the middle of the night. Normal people can barely see anything anyway.
It also meant her hair was back to the usual blonde—in all, she was no longer pretending to be someone else. If people had a problem with that, they were perfectly welcome to face the Blight and the monster horde themselves.
It became clear upon reaching the town square that she’d succeeded in utterly demolishing the town hall after unleashing hellfire in the upper floors hours earlier. ‘Succeeded’ might be a strong word, given that it was largely unintentional, but the result was nevertheless the same. It was all little more than a heaping pile of ash and charred wreckage. Damn.
There were also a lot of people starting to fill the square, enough that it was getting crowded. And while the whole process was fairly chaotic, overall, it was all surprisingly orderly. They didn’t stick around, though, and soon they were fanning out off in the direction of the abandoned mine.
The group of four wasn’t alone. There was a decent smattering of other fighters from around the town also forming an expanding perimeter. Zoe couldn’t help but wonder where the Inquisitors were. Surely they’re going to help out now that they’ve stirred up the whole town, right?
It didn’t take long for the first monsters to arrive. Before even getting a chance to use identify, Zoe knew that she was right, and that they would be defending against more ghouls. Go figure. There weren’t that many—yet—and it was a far cry from what she’d dealt with up North in the frozen wastes. Remembering how well she’d fared back then did a lot to boost Zoe’s confidence.
Identify!
The nearest ghoul was the first to be cut down, by one of Stella’s skills no less. A bloody, writhing vine had sprouted up through a crack in the cobbles and skewered the undead monster. Zoe managed to get some information on it before it was destroyed, though.
[ROTTEN GHOUL]
Rank E | Level 20
It could have been a Human, once, but then it turned all mushy and the skin sloughed off. That sludge is probably something best left untouched.
-Alignment-
> Infernal (Revulsion)
> Blight
-Strengths-
> Acuity
> Infectious Wounds
-Weaknesses-
> Fire
> Hallow
This one was even more disgusting than the fungal ghouls in the mine or the frigid ghouls in the frozen wastes. I guess that makes sense, given that it’s specifically aligned with Revulsion—overall, it wasn’t that much worse. The undead creatures were all fairly similar to each other, but they had some major superficial differences.
The frigid ghouls were, well, frozen. Thinking back, they reminded Zoe of a frozen, dried corpse that she’d seen at least half a dozen times in different kinds of horror movies. In contrast, the fungal ghouls were covered in well, fungal growths, and these rotten ghouls were dripping nasty puss and gunk from sores all over their peeled-away skin. Real nasty.
There were several more ghouls rushing towards them, and Zoe wanted to see how they stacked up to each other before more skills could tear them apart.
Identify!
[ROTTEN GHOUL]
Rank E | Level 19
[ROTTEN GHOUL]
Rank E | Level 20
[ROTTEN GHOUL]
Rank E | Level 20
[ROTTEN GHOUL]
Rank E | Level 22
They were all Rank E, and their levels were all suspiciously close together. I bet that has something to do with being created in one big ritual, Zoe mused.
“Correct,” Lilith chimed in, the intangible demon manifesting as a tiny, doll plushie on Zoe’s shoulder. “Well, I think that’s correct. Which makes sense, because I am you and your are me and—“
Zoe tuned out her unwanted mental passenger. Now wasn’t the time to worry about Lilith’s occasional, creepy, broken record thing. Taking note of the consistent weakness to fire the ghouls seemed to have, Zoe prepped herself to focus on her hellfire abilities. She also wanted to experiment with the Scythe of Loathing, though—is it possible to channel hellfire mana through it, somehow? A scythe of crimson fire sounded pretty awesome.
“Oh, yeah, we should definitely be able to do that,” Lilith interjected into her thoughts. “I doubt we even need mana manipulation for that. Just mana channeling would probably work, since it’s an enchanted infernal weapon.”
Huh. Zoe hefted the weapon in her hands. Lilith’s commentary was actually useful this time, and she didn’t waste any time before trying it out.
Mana Channeling!
Sure enough, it only took a few seconds of wrangling with her mana before the shaft of the weapon started soaking up a steady stream of hellfire-attuned mana. Wisps of crimson flame began flickering upon the edge of the blade—and Zoe wasn’t the only one to notice.
“Woah,” Sasha commented as she eyed the glowing edge, “that looks super scary.”
“Super evil, too,” Millie grumbled from the other side. “Why does it feel like every other person I work with has the most evil looking magic?
Zoe didn’t pay them much attention. She was more focused on the system notification that accompanied the hellfire now flickering across the surface of the weapon.
Mana Channeling has reached level 19!
Hell yeah! It was another skill getting close to reaching Tier III, and Zoe would always welcome more numbers going up. Her attention was soon brought back to the rest of the group, though, and they took just a few seconds to form a more specific plan.
Sasha and Millie were going to scout out farther ahead, pushing the fight farther out towards the edge of the town. Meanwhile, Stella and Zoe would stay behind and handle things close to the towns square. The reason for that particular division was simple.
Zoe was the one with healing abilities, so she needed to stay close to the bulk of the population, even if it made her feel like she was going to be missing out. As for the other demon, Stella claimed her abilities would work best in this situation as a relatively ‘static’ defense.
Within only a few minutes of the other two disappearing off into the night, the number of ghouls grew tremendously. It was less of an attack and more of a stampede, and it wasn’t hard to imagine how an unsuspecting town could have been completely overrun. Thankfully, the Inquisition had proved useful for at least one thing, even if it did take Zoe and Stella luring them over to the mine in the first place.
Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.
Oddly, there was still no sign of any other Inquisitors. Even the one who Zoe met, supposedly killed, and who subsequently alerted the whole town wasn’t present. And, even though Zoe already harbored a great deal of dislike for the Inquisition, she sincerely doubted they would have run off to let everyone else deal with the problem.
They might seem like violent, authoritarian zealots—but they also seem like the kind to actually put their money where their mouth is and actually do the hard part. That would make them dangerous, but it also meant they had to be doing something important nearby. Zoe just kept wondering what it might be.
By that point, strategic barricades of unnatural, Demonic-looking plants had sprouted up all over the area, courtesy of Stella. Those alone proved to be a great boon—even if they had been completely static, they were a great help to Zoe and others in terms of corralling the incoming ghouls and making the ‘battlefield’ just generally a lot more manageable.
That wasn’t the only thing they were good for, though, as the Demon of Passion channeled a variety of different skills through them, much like how Zoe channeled hellfire through her enchanted weapon. Hot, smoldering pollen sprayed outward, drifting onto whole packs of the Blighted monsters and igniting them. Bloody thorns snaked out, lashing around individual undead and draining them dry until they crumbled into powdery ash.
Zoe had no idea what the vines were draining, since the monsters didn’t have any blood—a fact that was quite inconvenient for her own abilities—but the results were undeniable.
While Zoe would have loved to bring her blood whip to bear again—she recalled just how effective it had been against those vicious little bunnies during her very first day in this world—her targets’ lack of blood meant that she wouldn’t gain any of the benefit the skill could otherwise get by absorbing increasing amounts of blood and power. She would be limited to whatever her own body could produce.
So, with that unfortunate restriction, Zoe focused on working with her hellfire skills, along with a few miscellaneous others, such as surgeon’s eye, life ray, cloak of scorn, rending touch and, finally, reap.
Hellfire Blast has reached level 13!
Hellfire Blast has reached level 14!
…
Hellfire Blast has reached level 16!
Hellfire Eruption has reached level 4!
…
Hellfire Eruption has reached level 8!
Life Ray has reached level 4!
Life Ray has reached level 5!
Rending Touch has reached level 14!
…
Rending Touch has reached level 17!
Cloak of Scorn has reached level 10!
Cloak of Scorn has reached Tier II.
+5 Perception, +5 Acuity
…
You have leveled up! You are now level 38.
+15 stat points.
+7% core progression.
The most important of those were surgeon’s eye, rending touch, and reap. The first was proving increasingly useful as a sort of weak-point visualization, helping Zoe immensely with efficiently cutting down the undead monsters. While it wasn’t a complete game changer at any single moment, it was definitely speeding up the whole process by a decent factor. It also seemed like it could eventually turn out to be the deciding factor in a more challenging, future fight. Right now, it mostly helped her gauge how close she was to killing a particular ghoul or which limps would be the best to target.
That was usually the legs—cut those off and the monsters became a lot less dangerous, if no closer to properly dead—but every now and then the skill guided her towards other targets.
The utility of rending touch was dramatically more apparent. It was a skill that was pretty much always useful in combat, and Zoe made great use of it with the Scythe of Loathing. Channeling the skill through the weapon was harder than either doing the same thing with a blood whip or setting it ablaze with hellfire, but fortunately, the skill itself was tailored to such a use.
Contrary to her earliest assumptions, the brutal, flesh-sundering magic wasn’t limited to literal touch. It did require some form of contact, but handheld weapons ‘counted,’ and in many ways, the effect was even stronger. It was also more costly, but with Zoe’s steadily growing spirit, the tradeoff was currently more than worth it.
Combined with the inherent stacking enchantment on the weapon itself, it was only a minute or two more before the ghouls were practically exploding the moment she struck. Every ghoul she brought down with the weapon added another increment of power to the blade, and while it started off slow, the effect soon scaled high enough to make a profound difference. It hadn’t been clear from the item’s description how strong or even useful the effect would be.
[SCYTHE OF LOATHING]
Rank D
…
Every soul sundered against the Scythe of Loathing’s edge adds power to a temporary enchantment. Along with moderately enhancing the blades cutting power and slightly increasing its range, the accumulated power can be unleashed all at once to inflict a single, devastating strike.
-Attributes-
…
Combined with both rending touch and the constant flow of hellfire attuned mana, the weapon became a true menace not long into the fight, and despite her still fairly low rank, Zoe was soon taking down more monsters than anyone other than Stella. The other demon was still two entire stages of advancement higher than her, though, so Zoe felt like she was doing pretty well.
And, finally, one of the two most stubbornly opaque skills on her entire status demonstrated its worth. I could never manage to activate reap because there was nothing to activate! Rather than a single, material effect that she could trigger at will under arbitrary conditions, reap was a sort of meta-skill.
Every time she put down a ghoul, she could finally activate the skill. It might not seem like it did anything, even then, but that was because the effect started out subtle. It was barely apparent, but as she continued to use the skill every time she defeated another undead, it grew.
Before long, Zoe was wreathed in a faint, crimson haze. The effect still didn’t do anything other than make her look even scarier—not until she finally activated the other half of the ability. Once enough of the effect had accumulated, she could unleash it all on one or a few targets—and the effect was dramatic, even with the skill starting at a mere level 1.
Reap!
The misty, sanguine aura trailing off Zoe’s entire body darted away in a flash, looking almost as if it had teleported into the air above a pack of ghouls that were attempting to skirt the edge of Stella’s combat-ready topiary fortifications. Condensing into a single, solid spear, the magic rocketed straight down into the center of the pack. The initial descend only struck one of the monsters, but it was immediately followed by an outward blast of the same crimson magic, so fast and precise it was almost like the edge of an expanding, circular blade.
All of the ghouls were destroyed instantly.
Reap has reached level 6!
The skill had leveled rapidly, shooting up straight to level three on the very first time Zoe managed to actually use it. It seems like comprehension does play a significant factor in how the system awards ability levels, so I suppose that makes sense, Zoe mused. It was a challenging skill to uncover, after all.
Sure, the system would provide a basic description of any skill—but the word ‘description’ was a bit of an overstatement, and Zoe had never found them remotely useful, especially in comparison to the descriptions of things like class choices or the information the identify skill often provided. For instance, the reap description only told her that it was a skill with blood alignment, high mana cost, and a ‘conditional effect.’ That hadn’t been much to go on. Now that she knew how to use it, though, Zoe was pleased. It also fits nicely with the way this scythe works.
It was a bit weird that it was called a scythe, in Zoe’s opinion, because it really didn’t look like one. A scythe shouldn’t even be a very good weapon in the first place—even if the idea seemed super cool—and therefore, the Scythe of Loathing didn’t have the iconic sickle shape. The blade alone was similar, yes—but it had been rotated by ninety degrees to stick straight out.
It was more like a spear with a giant, flat tip, or maybe a weirdly short sword stuck on the end of a long stick. Zoe still though it looked cool, though—especially since the whole shaft was a midnight black—and it was much more practical than the regular farm tool would be.
In all, things were going exceptionally well. She, Stella, and the various other defenders had been having a surprisingly easy time keeping the town square itself safe. The same could hardly be said for the rest of the town, but also, the Inquisitor had been quite successful in raising the alarm and getting almost everyone on high alert before the undead could arrive.
There was still no sign of Millie or Sasha, but Zoe tried not to worry. They’re probably just having a good time picking off ghouls up ahead before they reach us, she told herself.
“Or maybe the cultists killed both of them,” Lilith snickered from her shoulder.
Scowling, Zoe snatched the tiny, doll copy of herself and chucked it into the distance as hard as she could. That wouldn’t actually do anything, she knew, but sometimes it was the principle of the thing. The annoying demonic hallucination cackled as it vanished into the darkness. Ugh. Good riddance.
Lilith aside, things were going shockingly well—right up until the system handed Zoe a quest.
New Quest!
[DEFEAT THE BBEG]
Oh no! A group of amateur Revulsion Cultists have unleash a horde of Blight Creations upon the town of Blossomfell! You and your allies have defended the townsfolk admirably thus far—but watch out!
The big, bad, evil Guildsmaster approaches, and what happens next might shock you…
-Rewards-
> Guaranteed Level
> Title
> High quality Awakening Gem of Lightning
-Penalty of Failure-
> Destruction of Blossomfell
> Personal Injury and Potential Death
Zoe’s eye twitched. This quest was not at all exciting, but rather, it was very bad news—and worse—is that a stupid lightning magic and clickbait title pun?
