Too late, he realized what Hal was doing in the middle of his screaming rant as if he had to justify killing Hal somehow.
Hal didn’t want his HP, his STR, or any of those mundane stats. No, he was after something far more valuable. Something he could sense the Kinslayer had a surprisingly large stock of.
He wanted the Kinslayer’s Strain.
The Kinslayer’s eyes shot open, the red fuming glow faded rapidly as Hal latched onto the man’s Strain and pulled.
Corruption flooded Hal’s veins in such a massive quantity that even with his reduction to incoming Strain, he quickly jumped from the first to the second Strain Affliction Level in the blink of an eye.
“No!” the Kinslayer cried, brown eyes going wide and fearful. “You can’t!”
His Strain was different than Hal’s. Whereas Hal felt a twist in his stomach like he was about to get sick from his own kind of Strain, this Strain felt like somebody was trying to drag his intestines out of his navel.
There was a chaotic strength that Hal’s Strain lacked. It rampaged through his dying body, empowering him in ways he couldn’t begin to track. The Kinslayer had clearly taken the Ruby Stars path for his Beast Magic, whereas Hal had taken the Azure Fate path.
The blood-red hatred that coursed through Hal’s veins was evidence enough. He struggled to control and channel it into Besal, draining it away from his weakened body.
But it was too much for Hal to even begin to control. The more Strain he pulled, the stronger he became. Tapping Assimilation, Hal pulled at Besal’s deepening wellspring of power, replenishing his own resources.
Wounds reknit, forcing the Kinslayer’s hand out of his shoulder and lending new, frightening strength to his grip. Red fumes of Strain began to waft off Hal’s body as his Strain Affliction Level climbed ever higher.
He was falling into the torrent of rage and insanity.
Strain Affliction Lv.3 (Feral).
More Beast than Man, the corrupting influence of so much Strain has warped your mind until you can scarcely recognize friend from foe. Your thoughts are clouded by a need to do harm, but somehow you yet retain control, but only just.
Your constant use of Strain and its corrupting properties has begun to change you in body, mind, and soul. Irreparable mutations may occur with every additional Level of Strain Affliction.
Beast Magic Efficacy +150% | Beast Magic Damage +150%
Essence Tier +1 | Beast Magic Tier +1
Max HP +25% | Max MP +25%
HP Regen: +25% | MP Regen +25%
MP Cost -15% | Strain Accumulation +50%
Unlocked Ability: Essence Siphon
Leech the essential life force of a creature, drawing out its Essence in its purest form.
Unlocked Ability: Diffusion
Expend Strain to empower attacks and spells.
With an empowered shove, Hal threw the Kinslayer away and rose to his feet. He was only distantly aware that both of their swords lay at his feet.
He didn’t need them.
Hal could smell that the Kinslayer wasn’t Splicing anything. He was using his Beast Magic powers, but he wasn’t using them in the right way. The man was far too experienced to be ignorant of their purpose and that gave Hal a moment’s pause.
A strange twisting motion, like water flowing down a drain, drew his eye to the Kinslayer’s chest where his black oily cloak seemed to be drawn into the Kinslayer.
He didn’t give it much chance to hold his thoughts as Hal lobbed an eldritch-infused Bomb Toss at the Kinslayer. At the last moment, the Kinslayer Spliced dragon essence and lobbed his own Bomb Toss at Hal.
The two opposing essences created a twisting scar in the air where their explosion should have been. Wind rushed all around them, tainted and foul as the implosion collapsed upon itself with a brief crackling sound.
For a moment, the pair stared curiously at each other.
Hal had never fought another person using Beast Magic, and despite the Kinslayer’s age, he apparently hadn’t either.
This was new for both of them.
Divebomb came next, shifting to aberration, Hal empowered the spell into a gruesome mockery of its shadowy phantasmal self. The spell came out dripping blood and twisted with spiked bone.
The Kinslayer pulled back both of his fists to rest at his sides and opened his jaw wide. A screeching sound belted out of his mouth. Hal didn’t directly know the spell, but he could sense the arcana essence of a mimic on it.
Hal dove to the side, aided by the beating heart of Strain within him. He lashed out with a tendril of plantoid essence as he rapidly Spliced once more and made full use of Deep Magic to alter the essence of his attacks.
When the two spells collided, Hal expected another implosion. Instead, they created an impossibly strong explosion that pushed the pair apart. Hal went right over the edge of the parapet.
The lashing vine of plantoid essence was meant to snare the Kinslayer, but the explosion blew them apart with such force that Hal never came anywhere near striking the man.
But he was fortunate for making the essence-limb all the same. As he was blasted off the parapet, he curled the limb across one of the crenellations, arresting his fall. A look down the sheer cliff reminded him that he would have fallen a very long way indeed.
Yanking himself up to the parapet, Hal found the Kinslayer similarly getting to his feet. That twisting motion at his chest was speeding up, the cloak thinning to reveal more of the man’s muscular body.
If Hal could have cut through the rage and madness clouding his mind, he might have understood what it meant. But he couldn’t. He was just as trapped in the cycle of hatred and anger as the Kinslayer seemed to be.
A pair of large essence-wings erupted from Hal’s back as he Spliced eldritch, shadow, and aberration. They erupted from his back and spread out wide to either side. He wouldn’t allow himself to be defeated simply because he fell.
Across from him, the Kinslayer responded in kind.
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White bone, streaked with angry red lines, braced tattered shadowy skeins of essence that erupted from Hal’s back. The ends of his much larger wings were possessed of cruel aberration tips that could rend and rip like gaff hooks.
The Kinslayer’s wings were clearly meant to be in direct opposition of Hal’s. Stone etched with glowing runes made up the Kinslayer’s “bone,” golem essence, while the wings were leathery and powerful with a deep crimson hue.
The similarity to a dragon’s wings was unmistakable.
There was a sense of majesty to the Kinslayer’s wings that Hal’s lacked. While Hal’s were functional and far stronger than anything he could normally make, they were almost crude in comparison.
Had he been in his right mind, it would have been a clear reminder that the Kinslayer was more practiced than Hal was, and a far more seasoned essence hunter besides.
Hal swept an arm out, casting Goblin Rush laced with plantoid essence. The Kinslayer sent out the very same spell, but shifted it to vermin. The Kinslayer’s Goblin Rush consumed Hal’s in the blink of an eye and rushed toward Hal.
Curling his wings defensively around himself, Hal summoned Deep Magic to form a fiery black barrier of eldritch and shadow across his sheltering wings. The spell hit but did minimal damage as the fires consumed the fell magic as easily as he would swat aside a meager blow.
Unfurling his wings, Hal fought to understand what that meant. Or even how he managed such a feat. He was going purely on instinct, even Besal’s voice was oddly quiet. He had expected Besal to take over, instead, it seemed they were both plunged into the depths of chaos.
Back and forth they went, lobbing spells aligned to one essence or another as each tried to outdo the other. Hal threw out an aberration and shadow Divebomb.
The two essences were in direct opposition to each other. It should have never worked, the spell should have simply broken apart as soon as Hal released it. And yet he knew he could keep it together.
To his sur
prise, the Kinslayer’s eyes only widened in horror at the way the spell seemed to be constantly unmaking and reforming itself. The Divebomb’s wings broke away, then sprouted anew with bloodied bone and twisting sinew.
The spell’s shadowy beating wings and blood-red eyes streaked into the Kinslayer as he threw up his wings to shield himself too late to do any good. The spell slipped within his defenses, and Hal launched himself in the air toward the man.
Injured, but far from crippled, the Kinslayer spread his wings with a furious roar. Out lashed his hand, and Hal realized he couldn’t hope to defend against the attack.
So he didn’t.
Hal extended out his own hand, holding onto a sizzling Bomb Toss. Combining the volatile mix of aberration and shadow, the ethereal bomb nearly blew apart in his hand as the Kinslayer let fly his spell.
An arc of lightning blasted out from his hand, hitting Hal square in the chest. It collided with explosive force dropping a quarter of Hal’s HP. He accepted the hit, flapping his large wings to compensate for the sudden shift, pushing him onward.
The Kinslayer couldn’t get another spell off by the time Hal collided with him. He jabbed his Bomb Toss into the twisting wound at the Kinslayer’s chest, and to his surprise, his hand easily dived inside with hardly any resistance.
Once his hand was within, he released the explosive, unstable bomb, and kicked off the Kinslayer.
But the Kinslayer wasn’t stupid, just as Hal had accepted a hit in exchange for dealing a more substantial blow to his foe, the Kinslayer had closed his expansive wings around Hal.
Like a massive venus flytrap, the Kinslayer’s wings caged Hal within. His thick arms wrapped around Hal, trying to pull him into a tight embrace.
Brown eyes replaced once more by red fuming hatred, the Kinslayer stared face-to-face with Hal. In those eyes, Hal could see his madness and hatred reflected.
It brought forth a semblance of cogent thought.
At that moment, Hal realized the connection he hadn’t fully grasped before. Every time the Kinslayer had used Beast Magic, the wound on his chest had grown. The black oily cloak had grown thinner and less substantial.
Whether he did it intentionally from within the swirling red-misted chaos or not didn’t matter. Hal had forced the Kinslayer to draw strength away from whatever he was battling in order to fend off Hal’s magic.
“You don’t know what you’ve done,” the Kinslayer said with a grimace. “I’ve held off the corruption of our fell magic for ages, but this… void within me….” He shook his head with a grimace. “I held it back with Strain, and with my Beast Magic, but you had to force me to extend myself too far. This will consume me before long. And I’ll make sure I take you with me!”
Hal’s Bomb Toss exploded inside the Kinslayer.
The pair were blown apart, Hal’s HP halved again as he was thrown and tumbled hard against the stone floor. The Kinslayer had fallen to his knees, grasping at his chest.
His living cloak slipped within the twisted wound on his chest. It was a deep, black wound the likes of which Hal had never seen before. At its center was a horrifying bead of darkness that had no equal... except one.
It reminded him of the Abyss, and that thought filled Hal with unimaginable dread that broke through the red madness that clouded his mind.
A beating heart of darkness, a black hole the size of Hal’s fist formed from that darkness and pulled at the air around him. The Kinslayer’s body twisted and aged. Black veins of corruption ran all around his limbs as they became strangely emaciated.
The strength and muscle the Kinslayer had once possessed wasted away in moments. He became something twisted and sad. Throughout it all the Kinslayer stared with burning hatred at Hal. His red-fuming eyes faded and turned black as coal. Lifeless.
A darkness deeper than even the corruption of Beast Magic had come to inhabit the Kinslayer. Down below in the gap, monsters screamed and wailed in a frenzy.
Rising to his feet, Hal summoned Bomb Toss one after the other, lobbing the unstable aberration-shadow bombs at the Kinslayer.
Three spells in rapid succession threatened to pull his awareness away as his Strain jumped up to the cusp of another Level.
With a sickening series of cracks, the Kinslayer twisted its head to regard the arcing bombs. His emaciated blue-tinged hands turned into twin claws and the black hole at the center of his chest began to pull at the air with so much force that Hal slid toward the creature a few inches.
The very light of Hal’s miniature sun seemed to dim for a moment as the bombs were pulled inside that abyssal darkness. Unlike before, they did not detonate. They simply disappeared, shrinking down to nothingness as if falling down an impossibly deep hole.
Looking at Hal with those dead, coal-black eyes, the Kinslayer gave him a rictus of a grin. “I do not know how you manage an impossible feat of mixing opposing essences. But it hardly matters.”
He took a shaky step toward Hal, then another. The stone cracked beneath each step, the bits of stone that broke free whipped up into the Kinslayer’s black hole of a heart.
“You will die here,” the Kinslayer rasped. “This power that flows through me… you have reached the pinnacle of your strength. I can see that clearly now. And I have eclipsed you in ways you could not possibly comprehend.
“Perhaps Rinbast saw some spark of himself in you. I know of nobody else that could wield Beast Magic as you do. Weak as you are, you should have been ripped apart trying to keep those opposing forces in check. But such a feeble trick will not serve you against the power of the Shadesblight that courses through my veins.”
“It’ll consume you,” Hal said, strangely sure of his assumption.
Elaise hadn’t explained much about the voidmist, but he knew well enough that it was almost always a death sentence to be touched by it. If it managed to infect the person, they changed into something hideous.
Hal stared at the inexorable march of the Kinslayer, as he did his name changed. It shifted into something else. Hal didn’t quite understand the meaning behind it.
Voidwracked Kinslayer meant nothing to him.
But he couldn’t deny Elaise’s fears whenever she spoke of the voidmist and what it did to a person. It was why they wore those swirling tattoos. Without those strange items they gave to Hal’s Guild to ward off the voidmist, would this have been their fate as well?
Hal was struck, suddenly, by how close to ruin they were. The voidmist lurked just outside of the manaseed’s barrier. Without it, they would have all succumbed to the same corruption at the Voidwracked Kinslayer before him.
Any remaining thoughts were driven from his head as the Voidwracked Kinslayer launched himself at Hal.
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The black swirling water of Sinker Drill rolled over the Voidwracked Kinslayer’s hand. Hal’s Warding was on its last layer, even with it and the strength of his Strain Affliction, he wasn’t sure he could survive another hit.
Working quickly, Hal fell to one knee and swept his left arm up and out to bat aside the Voidwracked Kinslayer’s attack at the last moment. Red mist curled around Hal’s arm as he struggled to keep the Voidwracked Kinslayer’s spell away from him.
And all the while, Hal stared into the abyssal darkness of that black hole. He could feel his strength siphoned away into it. Swirling red chaos rolled off his body and funneled into that heart of darkness.
As it did, Hal’s limbs grew heavy. He couldn’t keep this up.
The Voidwracked Kinslayer’s Sinker Drill began to twist back toward Hal. His arms shook with the effort of slowing him, but it was a fruitless endeavor.
Hal reached in and conjured Divebomb, knowing it would push him over the edge into a new Level of Strain Affliction. It would, however, do nothing so close to that terrible black hole.
He didn’t know what would happen, or if he’d retain any semblance of control as he did now, but the alternative was worse. He was effectively ‘holding the wolf by the ears’ as the saying went.
As he expected, the spell flew from him and was almost immediately consumed by the black hole in the Voidwracked Kinslayer’s chest. A moment before his sanity was ripped away, he noticed that the man’s arm weakened ever-so-slightly at the same moment the spell was absorbed.
Pain and confusion swirled in Hal, drawing him far away from the battlefield as new strength flooded his limbs.
Strain Affliction Lv.4 (Primal).
Your control dangles by a thread. Corruption runs rampant through your body. Lose your focus for but a moment and the corruption will take root, mutating your physical body in unknowable ways.
Beast Magic Efficacy +300% | Beast Magic Damage +300%
Essence Tier +2 | Beast Magic Tier +2
Max HP +50% | Max MP +50%
HP Regen: +65% | MP Regen +65%
MP Cost -25% | Strain Accumulation +100%
Unlocked Ability: The Dark Between
Summon otherworldly darkness from beyond the farthest stars in a 30ft cloud. All other creatures within take Corruption Damage and are Blinded, Muted, and Deafened. Only the Beast can see within the impossible darkness.
Unlocked Trait: Beyond the Veil
While within the corrupting shroud of The Dark Between, you gradually recover HP.
The fierce build-up of Strain forced the two away from each other in a red-and-blue-tinged swirl of chaotic energy. Ruby lightning arced across Hal’s new body, one black as pitch with long claws instead of fingernails.
Unlike before, he wasn’t shoved into some nameless pit. He was there, alongside Besal. Hal tried to flex his hands. To his surprise, his limbs responded.
“Interesting,” Besal said, and he could feel that Besal was speaking with his voice. They were, somehow, both in command of his body.
“Are you doing this?” Hal asked, again it felt odd to speak to himself so plainly. He tried to subvocalize but found he couldn’t. They were both drawn to the front. “What’s going on?”
Beastborne Page 93