The crawlers were annoying to deal with. The pain he could handle, hell, his human self hadn’t blinked much at getting a hand shredded by the recoil damage the spikes dealt. The bone claws helped as their durability could easily sustain damage and allow him to avoid it entirely if he was a wimp and didn’t fully follow through with his attacks to spare his claws. Even so, their toughness was absurd.
Imbue Astral, for example, was about as good as a sock full of nickels against set concrete. Mark Prey didn’t do the job either as it only gave a bonus to his attacks and, well, his claws weren’t cutting it. For the record, even when Khare landed shots on the crawlers they couldn’t break the plating unless they landed several in the same area which… they did manage to do before Daniel got his first kill.
That frustration had allowed Daniel to break through, finding another way to take them down since it should be pointed out, he was working at a disadvantage compared to most on the team. He had a dozen powers to awaken, running at half capacity, while still managing to be the top performer in most cases. It surely wasn’t that his hybrid form and class had flaws, he just hadn’t found the solution to everything yet.
Anyway, shortly after one crawler’s broken body fell to the floor, he had turned to the one dozens of swipes, one blast from Lion Charge, and a few ill-advised bites hadn’t scratched and felt the awakening.
Corrosive Claws (Ability, Intelligence, Spell: Natural Melee Weapon, Domain: Enchantment, Level: 2:
You possess the Power to temporarily enhance natural melee weapons you wield with Damage: Acid for a modest amount of Mana over a short duration. While empowered, this elemental damage will not harm your body, but will affect any other Item or Creature in direct physical contact. This is a Magical Ability that does not function in an area of Magical Suppression.
It was an awesome power, with drawbacks, as despite the name Daniel could apply it to any natural melee weapon he had. While his claws could use an acid coating to drill into the armor, he didn’t have the best leverage to punch through and get quick kills. It would be great against normal enemies regardless as no one liked acid getting into fresh cuts, and the bone claws would hold up over at least the fight due to their enchanted durability, but it came with the downside of dissolving anything he touched that wasn’t enchanted.
No, there was a better, cooler way, and that was using the power on his fangs. It didn’t do anything gross like turn his saliva green but simply made anything that touched his mouth dissolve. The limited mobility of the crawler’s joints in grade 3 meant he could latch onto a spot on the part of the limb close to their main body, tank whatever the spikes did to him while partially healing it back, and break through far faster than if he’d had to charge a Power Shot as a human.
The only downside of using it this way was it made his mouth always taste like he’d just licked a battery. He destroyed two of the crawlers, saw the ones from the higher floors were taking the long way down, and quickly returned to the core of his team on the first floor to reorient before the next mana pulse. “Two kills left. Is everyone ok?”
“That’s fucking creepy,” Tlara commented first, having the opportunity to do so as she wasn’t directly contributing to the fight and didn’t have to work as hard as Willow to stay safe. There was a line of feathers down one of her arms that had begun to crystallize, but the corruption hadn’t taken a stronger hold than that. They’d brought down the ranged projections to three each, counting the impalers and casters that had come with the latest batch of reinforcements. Given that those on the second floor were still pointlessly targeting Daniel and those on the third were trying and failing to find Shuni, the only real damage that had been taken was from the bastion’s area attack. That it hadn’t been repeated either meant it was a one-time thing from the upgrade or it had a long cooldown.
“You’ve seen me like this before,” Daniel answered back coyly, half-smiling at Tlara. It was true that she could still get to him, but only when true power wasn’t within his grasp making all her taunts and bluster seem shallow. “Pretty hypocritical coming from someone who goes full monster. The rest of you?” he asked, before the Beastmaster could protest.
“It’s spreading,” Khiat answered in a worried tone. “And that big one heals everything I do to it after every pulse.”
“Sigron might be getting tired too,” Willow warned, choosing not to comment on his interaction with Tlara. “It looks like he’s getting better with that arm, but he only gets mana with every pulse, not health.”
Daniel looked up at the titan in the center of the floor and couldn’t help but feel a rush as he decided on his next course of action. “Shuni, don’t kill until the next pulse!” His reading of her through Pack Insight was weak, but enough to assure she wasn’t in dire straits. She could hold out. “Khiat, keep the second floor suppressed. Tlara, Willow safe. Khare? I’m going after the bastion. Let’s see if you can kill a crawler before I get mine.”
…
If you ignored the fact that all his friends were slowly dying amid dangerous ruins, Daniel had every reason to be excited. The bastion just looked like a fun enemy to fight. It was twice as tall as he was, head barely scraping the next floor’s landing, and cut an imposing figure despite the fact that its attacks were kind of weak. He’d gotten winged by one of the shield arms without too much issue, though anyone without ridiculous self-healing would have needed to take a moment to recover. That moderately impressive strength was paired with a below average speed and lack of subtlety, and it seemed Sigron had dodged as many blows as he had outright blocked.
No, it paid to remember that the projection was called an arcadian bastion. It wasn’t a siege engine but the thing to be sieged, and in that light it regaining most or all of its health with each pulse made sense. The bastion was forcing them to either focus a lot of effort on it to take it down permanently while exposing them to the rest of the projections, or allow it to survive and continue posing a sizable threat.
However, they had carefully curated the battlefield to minimize risk. The handful of casters and impalers Shuni wasn’t distracting could be managed, and the massed group of maulers were stalled out by another expensive Grounding Roar. Those projections seemed practically useless, but they had been able to rough up Sigron toward the end of the last fight. If his team had been more melee focused, they would have been a bigger issue.
“Hanging in there?” Daniel asked sideways to Sigron as he watched the Knight use a more slanted shield to deflect a sword swipe from the bastion. The look Sigron gave him in return was haggard, though part of that was no doubt due to taking in Beast Mode Daniel for the first time. No explanation could truly prepare someone who’d known both Daniel and Hunter for seeing both of their aspects merged into one. Lograve made a joke about that before, heh.
He vaulted to the side before any proper exchange could be made, avoiding a swipe from one of the shield arms. Whatever taunt power Sigron was using didn’t protect other people in range of his foe, though Daniel had the sense he could retreat and be fine. Not going to happen.
Corrosive Claws was activated on his hands as he sized up the threat. The power made his claws feel slippery whenever they brushed against the enchanted ones, but otherwise it was a more pleasant use of the power than the one he’d made before. He was also happy to see the power didn’t change the color of his fur or anything dumb like that, even if he would begrudgingly admit Tlara’s ability to palette swap her monsters was kind of neat. They’d held back from doing that this time because the crawlers were all above them, and her inferior power created physical acid that could drip down on them.
Cut off the head, Daniel decided. He was reasonably sure he could rend half of the limbs in the same amount of time allowing Sigron more breathing room, but they needed a quick kill.
Taking a page from Evalyn’s playbook, Daniel waited for a shield arm to try and crush him. Stepping to the side, he activated Opportune Moment for the first time in a while, quickly grabbed on, and began climbing up. The bone claws bit in first before his true claws added sizzle to the line of gashes trailing him up the arm. Another tried to scrape him off, but Daniel was faster both in speed and perception while the ability was running. The faintly helmet-shaped head of the bastion made a thick connection with the torso that could barely be called a neck, and from how it felt when he gripped into part of it it was solid all the way through.
Grunting with effort, Daniel dug in and then tore off a section before flipping backward and onto the arm that was trying to crush him. Maneuvering like this was something he couldn’t have managed while human. He would have had Keen Senses running to hear the attack coming from behind, but the instincts just wouldn’t be there.
It was a slower process than he would have liked, but Daniel steadily wore down the bastion over a minute. Khare managed their kill first, though everyone else had held back to prevent another mana surge. Sigron had even had a moment of brilliance, abandoning the bastion and rushing to the base of the stairs to hold the maulers there before they spilled out onto the lower floor.
Severing the head with a final slash, Daniel continued through the air to land on the ground behind the bastion. He awaited both the satisfactory fall of the now headless bastion, as well as the next mana pulse, but neither occurred. Instead, his eyes opened wide as he registered an attack coming for him and scrambled to evade the meters long rock-hide sword before it impaled him.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
It can fight without its head? That’s bullshit. His head whipped around, taking a closer look at the rest of the fight to see what the delay would cause. Some of the maulers were already vaulting the side of the stairs to get around Sigron, and there was a concerning amount of corruption growing on Tlara’s spark rhino. What shots the casters were able to get out were hard for the bulky beast to dodge.
If they had to kill this like they had Casia, it was insane. Sure, they could have Khiat pour sun arrows into the torso and hope to blow it up that way, but for it to fully heal with every mana pulse was beyond reasonable. Was it just a solid golem, or was there some hidden… Huh. I didn’t know it could work that way.
Mark Weakness (Ability, Intelligence, Spell, Domain: Illusion, Level: 1):
You possess the Power to briefly reveal weaknesses in enemies and enable your allies to target them. This ability requires a minor amount of Mana, scaling with the target’s Endurance and inversely scaling with your intelligence. Targeting an enemy with a higher Level than yours increases the mana cost exponentially, and vice versa. This ability reveals only physical weakness and does not provide any information on Vulnerability, Resistance, or Immunity to types of damage. This is a Magical Ability that does not function within an area of Magical Suppression.
So far, his new form had come with new powers. This was an old one, but it also felt right, in line with who he was in this body. Daniel glared at the bastion, feeling more than a third of his mana get consumed by the power. Knowing he would get it all right back made it hurt less, but what paid it off was the moving spot of orange light that lit up in the bastion’s chest.
“Khiat, try and hit that! I’ll keep him busy.” Saying that, Daniel continued to stay within reach of the bastion but did not try to attack it. By the looks of the orange light, it could freely move within the chest cavity. Damaging it himself wouldn’t do too much, but if Khiat could drive one of her ridiculous arrows through it that might- Duck!
He’d forgotten about the maulers. Well, not forgotten, he wouldn’t forget, he’d just been focused. Busy. The mace hadn’t hit him anyway. Daniel felt his rage slip for a moment and almost tried to claw the offending mauler’s head off before he caught himself. Instead he grew increasingly pressured as more maulers complicated the melee. He’d done training in this body, sparring with Janice and stealth excursions as examples, but he’d never expected to be outnumbered and unable to attack back to thin the crowd.
Taking injury was inevitable, especially as pulling out something like Flash Jaunt could unleash the bastion and maulers on their now unprotected backline. The remaining crawlers had already reached the bottom and were causing problems, which would only get worse next pulse. At the very least he shifted and twisted out of the bastion’s attacks, but at the cost of heavy blows from the maulers. He’d largely written them off because of how well Sigron handled them, but that was neglecting the fact that his class specialized in defense.
Rage was building within Daniel at every blow that connected, growing harder to control. There was at least one broken rib slowly mending itself. He remained immune to the corruption, though there was an intense itchiness Sense Astral gave him in the moments after a hit. Still, he was finding fewer reasons to hold back and was about to reset the bastion when Khiat finally landed her shot.
Part of the problem had been her ability’s cooldown and after effects, with the bottom floor growing more hazardous also being an issue. She’d had to try and lead a target that moved at random, at times shifting to the other side where she couldn’t see the light. Missing with an attack would tip off the bastion that they knew about whatever was in there, making it all the more important she made her first shot count.
Daniel squinted his eyes as another sun arrow was released from Khiat’s bow, lancing out and perfectly intersecting with the orange glow in the bastion’s hide. It cracked through the front and back armor of the torso before impaling onto the far wall. Daniel was surprised to see a wriggling worm-like thing burning up from the radiant damage on the arrow’s shaft. It had indeed been crucial to the bastion’s survival as it now fell lifeless, but the stream of purple energy came from the worm rather than the bastion’s shell.
Anticipating the next burst, Daniel backed up from his fight and eyed each rift, waiting for reinforcements. None came, though the pulse of mana overloaded him as it flooded him with enough to have taken him from 0 to 100. Despite being at approximately 130% mana, there was only a slight tingle felt through his seventh sense as his mana flow surged.
“No new enemies. Good. Rush the last ones, use as much mana as you can!” The last pulse would give them 200%, and he could see that overload doing anything from creating mutations to explosions. There had to be actual reasons to fear the Crest beyond religion or the society of the Octyrrum would have allowed anyone to join Incursion Armies.
He took his own advice, using Mark Weakness on any enemy he could see. The crawlers took a lot, but not as much as the bastion. At first he was surprised to see several sections light up on their hulls, but he quickly realized those were places Khare had hit while trying to stagger out the crawlers. The impalers, casters, and maulers held no surprises, while the thin parts of the warden’s arms glowed.
The barrier creatures were guarded by their personal shield now, meaning Shuni was their best option for taking them out. He trusted her to it and turned to his task, destroying the maulers. They’d annoyed the hell out of him, it was only fair. By now, they were hitting with corruption and had some kind of self-heal. Whether it was exactly like his Regeneration, weaknesses included, was unclear.
Taking their heads off made it a non-issue. The numbers were still tricky to work with, but he didn’t need to hold back. In fact, Daniel’s first move was aggressive as he intercepted a couple trying to corner Sigron at the bottom of the stairs, the two sets of claws on one hand easily breaking through the back of a neck and giving him good leverage to transfer the momentum from Springing Strike into a lethal hit.
He immediately followed with another, this one combined with Jump and a hand wrapped around a second mauler’s neck. A mace got a glancing blow on his leg as he rushed heedlessly into the enemy, but it was just pain, nothing disabling. At the apex of the jump Daniel checked in on the second floor, locking a dead gaze with the last surviving impaler that was now dual-wielding its weapons. Whoops.
In the moment before it threw, a caster tilted its staff towards the impaler and its weapons became too bright to look at. Springing Strike was a committed attack, but even with his limited experience with the borrowed power, Daniel knew it wasn’t as straightforward as that. Common wisdom also held that you couldn’t combine two active powers at the same time. Considering he’d already executed the primary attack as he grabbed the mauler initially, it didn’t come as big a surprise that he found himself able to redirect his body partially.
One of the javelins struck the mauler, but the impaler’s aim was such that it tore a chunk of out his side. Better than being fully pierced like before, but the wound itched fiercely. Grade 4 casters can empower corruption weapons. Not good. Not too bad either since there’s only one dangerous one left. “Someone kill that impaler!”
Daniel landed heavily on one of the last two crawlers after calling that out, using Eyes on Me to draw the impaler’s attention as soon as his mana was available to use. Their recoil damage had become corruption-infused as well, and now that Sigron had broken out of the flank he needed to help the shotgun-crazed gestalt finish off these two. There was no vulnerable knee joint yet, but he could easily use the surging mana within him to reapply the effect from Mark Weakness that had timed out and locate the damaged sections of armor.
Working his way along the surface of the crawler was painful, and itchy, but with his immunity to the corruption there was no reason not to take the easy way. Ferocious Healing was already stacking with Regeneration to tend to his side as every claw thrust gave him more than the glowing horns took away.
“I’ve got this one, Khare, the other one!” Daniel sighed internally as he felt himself go back under 100% mana with the second cast of Mark Weakness. Another sun arrow from Khiat might have done the job, but she was still recuperating from the last one.
Finally reaching a glowing area on the central body, Daniel placed his hands back to back and speared down. There was an initial hit of resistance before the shell cracked. His mind was growing calmer at the continued kills, sensing the downswing in the fight after the bastion’s unexpected survival had raised his hackles. The wardens would be tricky at grade 5, but from the sound of it Shuni had gotten on top of the one on the highest floor. They could both tend to the second one once the last mana pulse hit, leaving the last upgrade from the casters as the only unknown.
How many are left anyway? He did a quick count and came up with 11, the warden on the top floor dying as he took census. Khare was about to bring down the last crawler after expending a truly ludicrous amount of ammunition, their vines able to operate both the blast bow and the smaller one the gestalt owned simultaneously. Tlara and the temporarily weakened Khiat were putting pressure on the last impaler, but the warden next to it was prioritizing its defense making things difficult.
“Surge incoming, dump what mana you can!” Concerned, he looked to Willow. She would have the hardest time getting rid of her mana, but he was glad to see a white mist suffusing the area around her as she continuously channeled Spirit Strike. For his part he spammed Mark Weakness on the last crawler, dropping to under 20% through continuously re-upping the effect until Khare broke through one of its armored sections.
Daniel immediately launched himself upward, shouting for Shuni to help him with the second warden before it could laser them to death, when the second mana pulse arrived. An immediate sense of malaise engulfed him as his legs spasmed, the active mana flowing through them to maintain Jump threatening to break the pattern like a flooding river overcoming its banks. He wasn’t sure what would happen if it did, but he doubted it would be good.
His thoughts on the matter were broken as he noticed something strange happening to the bottom floor rift. Like the lectorum’s, it had reached the point where all blackness had burned off in favor of the deep purple that the last energy from the crawler still connected to. However, there were patterns beginning to form from faint off-shades of the ubiquitous color. Runes. He wasn’t at all familiar with them and his hidden translation power did nothing, but they matched the general look of the message scroll Zolyra had given him, which was still useless while they were across what counted as a regional divide.
Shuni will have to deal with the warden alone, Daniel thought as he absently burned mana on Grow Feathers, knowing they would be blocked by the shield monster. I need to deal with-
The figure stepped quickly out from the rift. Their gait wasn't hurried, they moved smoothly, but with a speed only empowered dexterity could give, and at a level above Daniel’s. The head turned, half of it glassen in appearance while the rest still somehow bore feathers the once uncorrupted individual had in life. Yellow to orange like a sunrise, clashing with the purple as if both knew the other didn’t belong.
Daniel had only just been able to activate Jump/Springing Strike before the corrupted raised an arm, summoning something that fit over it and extended past her talons, and shot two lances of light at Willow and Khiat, striking both in the head.
