"HRUUH!"
Pain Resistance is level 35!
Armored Skin is level 29!
Armored Skin is level 30!
Armored Skin is level 31!
Felix could only stare, eyes bulging, as his body failed to respond. He couldn't even breathe, his lungs unable to move for several long seconds. He saw Magda getting smashed to the ground, her Force Walls shattered. He saw Pit limping, blood trailing on the ground behind him but still managing to fire off a Frost Spear. And directly in front of him, Felix watched as the Bloodtainted Guardian untwisted itself, it's impossible surrealist body contorting and stretching. The blue-white fire of his spell faded, and the damage done began to heal at a visible rate. A sharp, wet coughing sound drifted to Felix's ears, accompanied by a dissonant buzzing. It took him a second to realize that the monster was laughing.
In a whoosh, his breath returned, and Felix panted as he eyeballed his Health. That hit had dropped him to 30% Health. His mind raced as his body pulsed with pain. He couldn't survive another full on strike. His new Body, augmented by Armored Skin and an Endurance stat at 131 were likely the only reason his spine wasn't shattered right then.
With a pained grunt, Felix pulled himself out of the wall and landed heavily onto the ground below. The Guardian still advanced, though it had slowed to a cautious walk; the thing was cunning, that was certain. It started to gather dark vapor in its mouth again.
He didn't have much time.
My spells aren't strong enough to penetrate its defenses for long, and I can't get close enough to pummel it without getting swiped again. Felix wiped sweat and blood from his eyes. Something had cut open his scalp. He needed a stat boost, something to juice up his damage enough to put the hurt on this monstrosity. Aside from somehow earning another Title or gaining a level for no reason, he only had one option. Well, two really.
Apprentice Tier.
He starting running forward.
Shadow Whip!
Shadow Whip!
Two castings, this time both of them tacky tendrils of conjured shadow Mana. With a cry, he flung them forward and up, their length stretching as they did so to bash into the Guardian's triangular snout. With a Strength of 120 behind it, the whips snapped their head back, the dark lightning spell discharging into the air. Spinning around, Felix used his own momentum to increase his attack, bringing the whips across the Guardian's exposed throat.
Croaking in surprised pain, it stumbled backward. And Felix grinned.
I can do this.
Applying his will, both whips split into two, then four, then with a burning stab in his mind he split them again into eight. Something hot and wet rolled down his face, but he ignored it. Felix cast them forward, spreading their ends to tangle the Guardian's limbs. The creature leaped out of the way, but Felix didn't stop. Whip after whip, tendril upon tendril, he threw everything he had into it, burning through his Mana at a prodigious rate. His head felt like it was cracking open, each split of the whips taxing his mind in ways he didn't understand yet flared like white-hot fire. But he was used to pain; it was an old friend at this point.
Pain meant it was working.
Over and over, the whips lashed the Guardian, though they managed to counter and slice many of the tendrils before they hit. Still, wounds accumulated as fast as they healed, and Felix's arms burned with exertion. The Guardian yowled, another orb of liquid darkness forming in its jaws, and Felix wrapped a whip around it's snout. The spell aborted with a resounding thunderclap, sending out gobbets of cheek flesh as the monster's mouth blew from the inside.
Blunt Weapon Mastery is level 10!
Shadow Whip is level 25!
Congratulations! You Have Reached Apprentice Tier in Shadow Whip!
You Gain The Following:
+10 STR
+10 PER
+10 INT
Finally! Mindful of his Spirit damage, Felix let it pass without an essence draught. Still, a stabbing pain jolted from his left ankle, though it was soon lost amid the general flurry of energy the System poured directly into his veins.
The Guardian ripped through his tendrils, shredding their conjured substance with its steel talons and freeing its mouth. Felix watched as flesh began to re-knit across its cheeks, covering the gruesome teeth and tongue with ropes of withered skin. And it looked pissed.
Felix didn't pause, using hands shaky from stat gain to conjure dual orbs of Acid Stream. In a fit of inspiration, he pressed the two orbs together; a moment of tension and resistance, then an audible pop as the acid sloshed and mixed together. He now had a double sized orb of acid, rotating quickly between his two hands. Felix could tell it was stronger than his standard acid, but he felt it would have to be far stronger to do anything to this foe. He also did not miss that the Guardian was starting to move again.
My hands are busy I can't cast Shadow Whip again....He had little choice. God I hope this doesn't destroy my stuff.
Influence of the Wisp!
Enthrall Failed. Target Is Immune.
Blue-white fire immolated the creature, and it began screaming in that choking way again. The Guardian was smart, however, and it didn't try to put out the flames, it cut to the chase and simply began running at Felix. Eyes wide, Felix frantically poured more Mana into his spellform, dumping nearly three hundred Mana into it as it ballooned outward, now the size of a beachball and wobbling between his hands.
The ground shook with the Bloodtainted Guardian's loping advance. If he had the attention to spare, Felix would have thrown stone obstacles in its way, but it took everything he had to keep his spell from going haywire. It's not ready! He frantically poured Mana into the unsteady spellform, stretched beyond its intended function. It's not-!
It was too late. Guardian upon him, unable to dodge or else lose the spell entirely, Felix raised the globe of corrosive up into the air and gritted his teeth.
"FORCE WALL!"
With milliseconds to spare, a wall of yellow energy blinked into existence between Felix and the furious Guardian. It crashed into the magical barrier, the yellow Mana flaring red as the behemoth blood beast strained its limits. Blinking in surprise, Felix darted a glance at Magda. She stood, nearly fifty feet away with her arm outflung in two directions. One toward him and one toward the other blood beast, likewise restrained by a Force Wall.
Felix nodded at her, blood and sweat dripping down his face.
"Cast! Quickly!" She shouted at him.
So he did. The acid globule had destabilized further during his lapsed attention, losing about a quarter of its Mana and cohesion before he firmed up its shape with his Willpower. A little less than three hundred Mana invested in the orb, it still wasn't enough and he had plenty to spare. The Guardian strained against the barrier, flaring it orange and red in places as its claws and snout pushed and snapped at the magic. Felix focused, expending his Willpower further by shutting the enormous death beast out of his mind, putting every single iota of attention onto this spell.
It was a giant water balloon of acid, but that would do little to the blood beast. It had to be more. He had to DO more. Sounding out the shape of his Skill, he altered it, tweaked the pattern until the orb grew again, feeding it another two hundred Mana. Then he took a breath...and he tapped his shard, dumping all five hundred stored Mana into the spellform.
The acid orb grew huge until it was nearly six feet in diameter...but still, Felix wasn't done. Sunk deep into the pattern within his core, he knew this wasn't enough. So he lifted his hands, now spread as wide as they could go, and pushed, compressing the conjured magic. The acid steamed, the unsteady orb becoming a furious, boiling shape as Mana was pressed against Mana. Acrid vapor poured outward, falling like green mist as he compressed it, further and further, forcing it smaller with every pass. The Mana fought back, pushing at his hands with a bitter burn, eating away at his flesh until his hands were raw and dripping blood.
Felix gritted his teeth and bore the pain, letting it wash over him as he forced his spell to become something else. Something better.
"IT'S BREAKING THROUGH!"
The sound of thunder blasted across his senses, but Felix couldn't afford to look away from the dizzy lights within his own core; the rhythmic pound of huge feet and Magda's screams crashed against him, a terrible cold and anger blasting across his chest as Pit did something brave and foolish and...Felix tore himself away. There was only the spell. Or else...
Compress!
Mana leaked, boiling around him like a roaring waterfall, the sound like crashing cymbals and rolling timpanis. He pushed, his Strength and Endurance taking the load as much as his Willpower and Intelligence. Making a desperate gamble, Felix took the 10 free points he had saved and put all of them into Intelligence.
Compress!
A rising tremolo of notes came to a terrible crescendo and stuck there, sound stretched and strung between the beats of time. He opened his eyes. It was as if time had slowed down, his Intelligence and Perception working in tandem with something...else, to grant him an impossible snapshot. Green waves of acid and Mana were exploding all around him, expanding in a wave around his body as if he had splashed down in a puddle made of magic and death. Inches in front of him, battered by the corrosive waves, was one of the Bloodtainted Guardians, mouth wide in a snarl of pain while its legs still charged forward. Forward and to his right, only fifteen feet away, the second Guardian was frozen mid-lope, a dark power already gathering in it's jaws.