Despite the pain, the Manakeeper brought [Brilliance] down over its raised knee and snapped the blade in half. A blinding flash of light was released from the destruction of the blade and the Manakeeper wailed with fury, tossing the halves of the ruined blade aside.
It stomped around the arena, utterly blind. Too far to do anything, but also out of range of the blinding blast of light, Hal ran on. His eyes were fixed with malicious intent on the leaking Manaheart.
The irony that he had never been able to get the stupid enchantment to work right, but that the Manakeeper had when it destroyed the weapon wasn’t lost on him.
Let’s hope this works, Hal thought. He never before tried to use Blades of Bone, he was always busy with one thing or another, and as much as he wanted to experiment he simply didn’t have enough hours in the day.
Now he found himself without a weapon, against an enemy immune to his now very costly magic.
Hal brought to mind the image of a falchion, slightly curved and single-edged with a wicked tip. An intense itching sensation filled his palm as he funneled his mana into the arm, creating a sharpened blade of bone.
You use Blades of Bone.
You create a Bone Falchion +2.
MP -300.
Good thing I can’t make much use out of my MP!
That was far more expensive than he thought it would be. At least he had a weapon now. The grip was perfectly molded to his hand and despite being made of bone, it was blackened with red-veined streaks running throughout it.
It was not pretty, but it was functional. That’s what mattered. Hal looked at the still-wet gleaming surface of the blade and suppressed a shudder.
The blade looked more than serviceable. Hal launched himself over another shimmering Premonition warning, dodging a pillar of Conceited Upheaval in the process. His bone appendages caught him and helped him get to his feet to keep running.
Springing over the wayward swipe of the Manakeeper’s blind fury, Hal slashed with all his might at the Manaheart. Patient Offense was triggered from the two dodges and released an additional blast of force, creating a second accompanying fissure in the jewel. The light leaked out even faster, draining the Manaheart of color.
Hal landed lightly, quick-stepped to the side to avoid an errant kick, then leaped again with an overhand chop, shattering the Manaheart and triggering an explosion that blew him back and sent his [Bone Falchion] from his suddenly numb fingers.
Savage Critical!
You hit the [Manaheart | Lv.??] for 385 points of damage.
Additional Effect: Manableed.
Patient Offense wears off.
Savage Critical!
You hit the [Manaheart | Lv.??] for 403 points of damage.
Patient Offense wears off.
The [Manaheart| Lv.??] is destroyed.
The [Manakeeper | Lv.??] uses Weight of Will.
You suffer 127 points of damage.
Additional Effect: Paralysis.
Hal landed hard on his back, his head smacking against the floor and bouncing for another painful impact. He couldn’t move, could barely breathe for the pain and sudden loss of muscle control.
The only saving grace was that the Manakeeper was still blinded, swinging its large arms around as it tired itself out. Each swipe of its lumbering arms was overbalanced and ungainly. Hal could do nothing as it stomped around, trying to hit an enemy it could not see.
Unleashing all of those blinding enchantments at once must have been devastating for the affliction to last so long. It was the only reason Hal wasn’t already ground into a paste.
As the feeling slowly returned to his limbs Hal forced himself to sit up. His arms laid limp at his sides. He looked around for his [Bone Falchion] and found it quickly enough. It landed a few feet to his right and behind him.
Once his paralysis wore off entirely, Hal scrambled to his feet and retrieved the blade. He noted a long dark crack along the flat of the blade. Blades of Bone may service in a pinch but he guessed making a weapon so hastily did have its drawbacks.
The Manakeeper continually expended every ounce of its strength fighting an enemy it could neither see nor sense.
Ribbons of mana streamed out of its broken and lightless Manaheart and Hal focused on that as the creature’s remaining weakness. Pillars of ruby light erupted around him as Hal relied heavily on his Premonition to see the attacks before they hit him.
All the while building up stacks of Patient Offense for the final blow.
Unfortunately, whipped into a frenzy, the Manakeeper was devastatingly unpredictable. Even as Hal dodged one of its Conceited Upheavals, a swinging fist connected with his whole body and sent him flying across the arena. Wiping all of his Patient Offense in one sweeping blow.
A Premonition of golden light around the outer edge of the arena informed Hal of another attack that would shrink the arena further. Hal hit the ground hard and used the momentum to roll away from the edge, crawling free of the collapsing floor.
Another ring of light appeared as the Manakeeper stomped its foot with a resounding impact. Smart, Hal thought. He’s shrinking the arena, so it doesn’t matter if he’s blinded. As the ring gets smaller and smaller, anywhere the Manakeeper attacks is likely to hit me.
But only if the Manakeeper lived long enough to cut the arena down to size.
Hal lurched forward, using his spidery bone appendages to propel him forward. He lashed forward with the [Chain of Binding], using its enchantment combined with a Convergence empowered tug to propel him toward the Manaheart.
Releasing the enchantment, Hal gripped the [Bone Falchion] with both hands and flexed every muscle as hard as he could to bend his body back away from the sideways swing that narrowly missed breaking his nose and his entire face.
Calling Convergence to flood into his muscles, Hal snapped himself forward with everything he had, impaling the [Bone Falchion] up to the hilt in the now-dead Manaheart.
The Manakeeper roared with fury and agony.
A fist came from the side, slugging Hal in the ribs. He could hear a few of them crack like somebody stepping on stalks of celery.
The breath blasted from his lungs but still, he held on. Pushing through the pain, Hal focused on his Blade of Bone. Could he alter the blade while he was in contact with it?
Savage Critical!
You hit the [Manakeeper | Lv.??] for 377 points of damage.
The [Manakeeper | Lv.??] hits you for 107 points of damage.
You use Blades of Bone.
MP -80.
The [Manakeeper | Lv.??] takes 400 points of damage.
The [Manakeeper | Lv.??] takes 442 points of damage.
Hal shut out the pain with a scream of defiance even as another heavy body-sized fist slugged him from the other side. Fortunately, the Manakeeper couldn’t bring its full strength to bear due to the angle it would have to hit Hal at.
That didn’t stop it from trying.
Focusing on Blades of Bone, Hal lengthened and splintered the blade within the Manaheart. He widened the cracks, wrenching them apart, and sent bony tendrils into every crack that they could find.
Throughout it all the Manakeeper continued to stomp around, sending fissures and cracks around the edge of the arena, dropping the outer-most sections onto the distant battle below.
The hits kept coming, but Hal couldn’t let go of the sword, it was stuck inside the Manakeeper now and one glance over his shoulder told him that there wasn’t much of an arena left for him to stand on.
His best chance was finishing this before the Manakeeper dropped them both into the swirling clouds below.
Using Assimilation, Hal drained every ounce of his Stamina, converting it into HP and MP to continue to widen the cracks within the Manaheart and to shore up his rapidly depleting HP.
Hal kept an eye on his HP, watching it fall steadily south of 100. Each hit came slower and with less impact behind it until they stopped coming altogether. Hal opened his eyes, feeling the world shift and tilt around him.
/> The Manakeeper fell backward to the small arena with a resounding crash. The platform was barely large enough for its body. It didn’t move again. Hal collapsed atop the downed Manakeepr, fighting to stay conscious.
35
Wheezing, Hal couldn’t help but smile even as it became clear he might be in some serious trouble if he didn’t do something about that collapsed lung that was making it hard to breathe.
A moment later, the body of the Manakeeper shattered into disparate chunks of yellow-blue shifting crystal. It was a hard bed to fall upon and Hal shifted about to bring up the last [Elixir] from his Inventory and to his lips.
He paused a moment and instead tried to allocate the glut of EXP he’d gotten so far. It should be enough to Level Up… but he couldn’t. Was the arena still considered “in combat” somehow?
With a rueful shake of his head, Hal downed the [Elixir] without another option to heal his broken body.
The fruity mixture repaired his shattered ribs and his breathing came easier after he coughed up more than a little old blood remaining in his lung. He hadn’t thought it was punctured….
A sweeping, numbing sensation fell upon him like he was just dunked in freezing cold water. The shock to his system made it impossible to do anything but lie there on the painfully jagged crystals littering the ground.
It only took him a moment of wondering until the prompt appeared, reminding him how much of a mistake it was to down another [Elixir] so soon after the previous one.
You use an [Elixir].
Toxicity +200
You recover full HP.
You recover full MP.
You are afflicted with Elixir Toxication (Stage 1).
HP & MP Restoration Nullified.
Duration: 50hrs.
The numbing sensation faded and Hal took a moment to read the message again, cursing himself for not paying closer attention to Toxicity. He knew it might be an issue and in the moment of pain drank the [Elixir] anyway.
He didn’t have long to kick himself over it. A series of distracting prompts pulled his attention from his mistake.
You defeat the [Manakeeper | Lv.??].
You gain 10,500 Experience Points.
You absorb 125 Eldritch Essence.
You earn 10,500 Sparks.
You earn the Title: Squallbreaker.
+10% Manastorm Loot | +40% Crystalline Manastorm Loot
Manastorm Enmity +120%
You obtain:
[Crystal Manashard]
100 [Empyreal Shardite]
[Heart of Crystal]
Your Manatree Skill has risen to Level 6.
+3% Manatree Spell Potency (+18%).
Your Sword Skill has risen to Level 16.
Your Sword Skill has risen to Level 17.
+1% Sword damage (+17%).
-0.25% Sword durability loss (-4.25%).
Your Improvised Weaponry Skill has risen to Level 16.
+2% Improvised Weapon damage (+32%).
+2% Improvised Weapon attack speed (+32%).
Your Enfeebling Skill has risen to Level 15.
…
Your Enfeebling Skill has risen to Level 18.
+1% Enfeebling success (+18%).
+2% Enfeebling duration (+36%).
+5% Enfeebling magic resistance (+15%).
Your Evasion Skill has risen to Level 14.
+1% Evasion speed (+14%).
-1% Stamina cost (-14%).
Your Parry Skill has risen to Level 8.
+1% Parry success (+8%).
-1% Stamina cost (-8%).
Your Beast Magic Skill has risen to Level 18.
…
Your Beast Magic Skill has risen to Level 23.
+3% Beast Magic Spell potency (+69%).
-2% Beast Magic MP cost (-8%).
You have 1 Beast Magic Perk point awaiting assignment.
Monster Attunements Available
Eldritch: 2
Hal slowly rose to his feet. The shifting crystalline fragments of the Manakeeper’s body shimmered and vanished into his Inventory. He swayed momentarily, thinking that there was some other toxic effect from the [Elixir] he had taken.
He tried again to commit enough EXP to push Beastborne to Level 18, and though he felt the usual thrill of a Level Up… it did nothing to remove the toxication status.
Oh shirt. So there was a delay after combat ended. Not only that, but Leveling Up hadn’t wiped the toxic effect.
After a few more moments, he realized the truth.
Cracks spiderwebbed between his feet on the glassy floor beneath him. They spread out in a rapid series of loud pops. Even through the haze of the Elixir Toxication, he understood the danger he was in.
Hal turned about, quickly searching for that twisting distortion that brought him to the arena in the first place. He found it quickly enough, just as the floor beneath him cracked and gave way. Well before he could gather enough strength to his legs to make the leap toward it.
The distortion hung in the air above him as he fell, in the same spot where it had spat him out and then disappeared. The only problem was, the Manakeeper shrank the arena so much that it was barely 8 feet wide by the end.
Air rushing past, Hal twisted about in a desperate attempt to right himself. With arms and legs spread as much as possible to slow his fall, he managed to face the ground.
It was rushing up at him far too fast. Fear wormed its way into his thoughts and he spent precious seconds fighting it back to the dark corners it crawled out from.
He had to think clearly. Without his party, he couldn’t call for help. Not that he knew what they could do. He was falling hundreds of feet through the air. By the looks of things below, the battle was all but over.
It was a small comfort. Already the Manastorm clouds were dissipating, breaking to reveal the glittering stars and the shining axeblade edge of bandlight that cut the sky in two.
There was no need to go looking in his spells for something that could help him. He already knew there was nothing. An idea came to him then, as his exposed skin began to burn from the cold friction of the air whipping by him.
When he first gained his Beastborne powers, he had fallen in a similar way to this. Only, there were several large chunks of rock in that instance that he used to get to the cavern entrance in the wall.
There would be no such help in his current predicament. That hardly mattered because he remembered the gross – but hopefully effective – idea he had at the time. Utilizing aberration essence, he had the idea to make a parachute of thin membranous material to slow his fall.
No matter how he tried to describe it, he knew what it was. It was a flesh parachute.
Back then, he was just as likely to be crushed by falling debris as fall to his death but out in the open in the Mirrorlands the idea had serious merit.
Even as Hal shuddered at the very thought, he went to work calling upon his aberration and eldritch essence to create a thin sheet of aberrant membrane attached at his shoulder blades.
It was harder than he thought.
Several attempts came and went as the ground grew closer. By that time Hal could make out several figures pointing in his direction. Great, I’m going to have an audience.
Using eldritch to empower the flesh with red mist, the next large sheet he made caught the air behind him and bellied out to full sail. Even as the material began to rip he worked hard on repairing it.
Striking the correct balance between lightweight yet sturdy was difficult but he thought he finally had it. The feeling was deeply uncomfortable. But without a doubt, it saved his life.
Hal drifted through the sky, hardly able to believe that it worked and trying not to look up at the gross black membrane up above. He stole only one or two looks purely out of morbid curiosity – though he told himself it was to make sure it was structurally sound – and the bile that rose up in the back of his throat was his punishment.
It looked disturbingly similar to a blown up bubble of b
ubblegum, except black with red veins. Through it, he could just barely make out the night sky above.
The best Hal could do was lean one way or the other to encourage the parachute to veer in a large lazy circle as he slowly drifted to the ground.
Being up so high afforded him a better view than he ever thought he would see. Though much of the Mirrorlands was shrouded in the darkness of night, between the few moons and the bright silvery bandlight, Hal could just make out a few fantastic shapes in the gloom.
Tall twisted majestic spires, sprawling forests immortalized in crystal, and flat shimmering plains dotted the landscape. Dark pits, deadly cracks in the hardened, crystallized land promised a swift end to the unwary traveler.
From so high above, Hal’s Perception picked out multiple things, illuminating them in a dull glow. To the west of the caravan was a meandering crystalline forest, and at its center glowed a tall half-broken structure that looked a lot like an ancient guard tower.
To the north and east was the direction to the Manaseed. From his vantage point, Hal could make out several viable paths that would avoid the dark pits and cracks of the Mirrorlands.
Most importantly, and perhaps troubling of all, was the presence of a dull glow far to the south at the edge of his vision. He thought it might be a campsite but he couldn’t be sure.
The crystalline outcroppings of the Mirrorlands often glowed or cast strange lights but for some reason, Hal felt certain it was a camp. And one that would have been impossible to see without his sky-high perspective. The light came from a dip in the land that would hide them from even Angram’s keen eyes.
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