Chapter Two Hundred and Eight – 208You Have Defeated Deceit of Misfortune!
XP Earned!
Territorial Quest Alert!
You Have Gained Significant Contribution!
Save the Lost? Felix spared his notification a single glance, though his vision wavered with pain. It...cured her?
He hadn't had a chance to try out the other racial Skill he'd gained upon becoming a Primordial Nym. Or rather, he'd been too worried about how vague it's description was and put it off. So many other things were vying for his attention all the time...
Like, for instance, the Ghouls stomping through the darkness ahead of him.
Wrack and Ruin!
Wrack and Ruin!
Dual Casting is level 45!
The orbs of dark green Mana tore through the Revenants to either side of Felix, but when they reached the nearest Ghoul neither penetrated its thickened hide. It barely sizzled against them.
Status Condition: Spirit Damage
"Ugh, shut up," Felix groaned, slashing his left hand claws to create some space. With his right, he went to feed Essence into his club...and promptly spasmed, catching a Revenant's talon to his abdomen as he doubled over.
Corrosive Strike!
Acid wreathed Felix's left claw, swiping upward in a blind strike that gutted the beast. It fell backward, skreeling in pain.
Blind Fighting is level 44!
Even my Sovereign of Flesh is weaker. Felix ran a hand over the deep gouge in the scales protecting his belly. The Revenant had nearly torn through them. And he was running almost completely empty on Essence. The pain that stabbed at him was his core, greedily sucking at the emptiness where usually the cloudy nebula of power lived. One way to fix that.
Ravenous Tithe!
Death was rampant all around him. Some Felix had caused, but most not. His Tithe required him to claim it if he was to absorb the power, and slowly, Felix had come to learn that was merely a matter of Will. The Essence that burned from the smoking corpses of dead enemies contained pieces of Primordial, of the Maw. As far as the Hunger inside of Felix was concerned, that was his. No one else's.
Mine!
Glowing crimson vapor rushed toward him, filled with dark smoke like striations in a stone. Even the sky was not immune, as the cloying Mana radiation from the Scale was pulled toward him on a ceaseless tide.
The storm was reignited with him, though parts of it were being eaten up by his core ring again. Felix ignored that, focusing instead upon releasing a stream of that Essence into his weapon. The club grew, the Profane Sigils on its length burning with a crimson and blue luminescence.
"Much better," Felix grunted, before shoving it forward like a lance. The heavy weapon crashed into another Revenant leaping for him, checking the movement before sweeping sideways to crash into the rows that had surrounded him. "Back! Off!"
The ground trembled. Felix Blind Fighting Skill gleamed and he twisted aside, but not fast enough. A fist the size of a small boulder hit his face and shoulder, all at once, and he was slammed into the tiled floor. Stone shattered and Revenants were tossed aside as his body plowed a shallow furrow into the chamber floor.
"Eat!" The Pride of Blight bellowed. Felix saw the once-chorister looming out of the dust and smoke like a twisted, tooth-filled tumor, it's arms grown even heavier than before. Mouths had opened along his arms, tiny, gasping monsters with writhing tongues. Neither the Hand or any other of his allies were to be seen.
"Ugh," Felix said, rising to his feet. He coughed up dust and dirt that had shoveled into his mouth. "Why are Primordials so gross? Oror is that a Maw thing?"
The Blight screamed and charged.
Ravenous Tithe!
More of the room's ambient Essence and Mana siphoned into Felix, but the Blight wasn't slowed an inch. Felix yelped and dove beneath the thing's fist, coming up under the arm to deliver a caustic blow.
Corrosive Strike!
Felix's armored fist hit the former-chorister's elbow joint, easily as thick as his torso. On someone regular, it might have actually been useful. Instead, Felix felt his hand slip into one of the many teeth-lined maws on the abomination's body. The acid gushed from the mouth, and the damn thing bit at him and ripped straight through the scales on his hand.
"FUCK!"
"Got you," the thing chuckled. The Blight flexed, and suddenly Felix was air-borne again.
Felix fumbled at his waist, grabbing at his Femur of the Envoy with his left hand. He yanked it free and streamed Essence into his club again. The thin, metallic bone became a battering ram in seconds, hitting the Blight's elbow with all the force of his 296 points of Strength.
It did nothing.
Then lightning struck.
"GRUUUUAUAAAHhH!" The monster cried out, pain clear in its voice. The mouths all over it's deformed body all screamed at once, and Felix slipped free of it's nasty teeth. He landed in a crouch, and cradled his arm against his chest. Other than his many other injuries, he was unharmed. Somehow, impossibly, the lightning didn't even touch him.
A second, then a third lightning bolt coursed out of nothing to strike the Blight. Now the High Adept abomination was seizing, all but frozen in place by the immense currents shaking through it's flesh.
To Felix's utter confusion and delight, Elder Holt stood nearby, his hands out stretched. Bright, blue-white Mana crackled around him like a halo of volts, and his greying beard swayed in a violent gale.
"We got ya, kid," Holt groaned, his body flexing beneath the strain of his spell.
We?
A second stike, this one of shimmering grey-black Mana, stabbed from beneath the creature. A jagged jaw of shadows ripped from the earth and tore into the convulsing thing. Great gobbets of flesh stripped away from it's legs, and the Blight stumbled to a knee.
"If you're going to make a move," shouted Elder Regis, her face covered in sweat. "Do it now!"
He knew just what to use. Felix thrust his hand into the air. "Vess! Sword me!" A moment passed, but nothing happened. Just him with his hand raised like an idiot.
Where...? Vess!
Felix spun, frantically casting about for her, but he couldn't see anything. "Vess!"
She didn't answer.
He turned back to the Elders. "Hold on!"
"Sure!" Holt gritted through his perfect teeth. "Take your sweet ass time!"
Felix exploded from his position, tiles shattered with each step as he plowed through the Revenants gathered around where he had seen Vess. Revenants died by the truckload, but there were always more.