Unbound Deathlord: Challenge

by Edward Castle

  Eat this, developers.

  "Guards! Guards!" She yelled as she struggled. I didn't stop; I finished binding her and used the other whip I had to gag her.

  Renno still tried to yell, but her voice had been muffled. It was already too late for me, though. I heard steps and looked up. Lots of ghouls were coming from the right door. No veteran, no elite, no skeleton, only common ghouls. I sighed in relief.

  After being healed by Renno, I was pretty sure it wasn't necessary for me to close my eyes to heal myself, but this was not the best of times to test my theory. Closing them, I healed myself once and got my spear and shield back.

  The first ghoul was met with two darkballs and spear to the shield, dying just like that. When he tried to defend against the darkballs, the black liquid just went around the shield and got to his arms, dealing the full damage. I loved it!

  Sadly, that was all the magic I could do in the battle, since the other ghouls quickly got to me. It if wasn't for the spear's reach, I might not be able to hold my position and prevent them from releasing the woman. As it was, they all died very easily: a hit to the legs for them to drop their defenses and a hit to the head to finish them.

  I turned back to the mage just in time to see her turning back my direction, her hands untied, the bonds somehow destroyed. I desperately jumped on her and held her hands. We struggled for control, but as she had said, her muscles had atrophied. Plus, I had the advantage of weight, and that was a big deal in jiu-jitsu.

  After dominating her for the second time, I put my spear through her neck. Or tried to.

  No damage dealt to Badass Woman

  Shit. Damn high-level NPCs and their unfairness.

  This meant I had no way of killing her, which in turn meant I couldn't leave the prison alive. I did tie her hands with my last belt, but if she had untied herself once I had to assume she could do it again, and I doubted I could get out of her sight before she could free herself. If I wanted to survive, I would have to stay over her and hold her hands in a way that they couldn't point at me.

  The High Lady seemed to realize that, too. Eventually, she just stopped struggling and looked at me, still gagged. Unless I found a way to kill her, we would be close buddies until someone appeared to kill me instead.

  I hope the damn game system doesn't see it as sexual abuse of some kind.

  I tried to kill her with magic, and my darkball damaged her a little, but she merely created a death sphere and healed herself without having to move her arms or hands.

  Goddammit, I forgot the deathball can be used to heal without hand gestures.

  So we just stood there. Sooner or later some other deathlord, skeleton or ghoul would come to the prison, and it would be over for me.

  Frustrated and with nothing better to do, it was science time: I tried to create a death sphere with my eyes open, just like she had done, but it didn't happen.

  Afraid I might have lost my death magic for some reason, I closed my eyes and created a death sphere. The smoky dark gray energy in a perfect ball was there, in the gray space of my mind's eye. When I opened my eyes, it also stood before me, about a half a meter beside the dark sphere.

  With science time a failure, I decided to spend some mana in the hopes that my intelligence or my skills could level up. Keeping my arms and hands extended as I pinned hers, I created magical spheres and used darkballs and deathballs on Renno for a long time. I saw no reason not to heal her too; it wasn't as if it would make any difference.

  Watching the spheres become spells was kind of interesting. The death spheres became smaller balls and flew like arrows to Renno. The darkness spheres kept their sizes and just flew at the same speed I could throw a water balloon.

  People used to say an empty mind is the devil's workshop, and they were right; I always found that idleness and creativity walked together. I soon discovered I could not use two spheres at the same time, even though I could do it one right after the other, like some machine gun. After some tries, I managed to make a deathball hit a darkball before they got to Renno, and they acted just as if they had hit a target, trying to engulf each other and dissipating.

  All the while Renno just looked annoyed at me. At least that made me feel good.

  "Yeah, woman, I'm a newbie, and you can't do anything to me. Just watch me learn the very basics. Ha!"

  The hatred in her eyes intensified.

  Another idea popped up in my mind. I created a darkness sphere but tried to put the incoming darkness energy over my existing death sphere. It kind of worked, but the black liquid and the dark gray smoke just battled for a few seconds until both dissipated.

  When I tried to add more energy to the right spheres – death to death, darkness to darkness –, it worked, and the spheres got slightly bigger. I tried to send them flying, but they didn't move. So, I had just created useless magic spheres. Great.

  All I could do was dissipate them. Or... I could find out how big they could become!

  It has nothing to do with inferiority complex. Shut up, mind!

  Make darkness sphere bigger, close eyes, make death sphere bigger, open eyes. It was also an exercise in trying to keep my eyes closed exactly the required time of three seconds. Every time my MP got to zero, and I became a little dizzy, I just closed my eyes for about half an hour until my MP was recovered.

  And so the hours passed by. Some part of me kept telling me to use the time to level up my skills and maybe get a better spell to kill Renno, but unless the next skill dealt thousands of points of damage, there was no way it would be enough to kill her. She could fully heal my HP with a single death sphere, after all.

  Plus, I kind of became curious about what would happen when the two spheres touched each other. They did destroy each other when I created them in the same place, after all.

  The bigger the spheres got, the more times I had to add energy to grow them further and I guessed it was not mere physical volume that was at work there. I would have given up halfway if it wasn't for the very peaceful feeling I got when meditating; as if I couldn't care less about the world.

  That bothered me a little, the game acting on my mind like that. But since it was a pleasant sensation and very useful for now, I let it go. It surprised me a lot when I looked at the clock on the very edge of my vision and realized five hours had already passed without me feeling even a little of boredom. In the end, it took me all of thirty very relaxing meditations, seventeen whole hours, for something to happen.

  Both spheres used to be perfectly smooth, but when there were only a few centimeters between them, they reacted with one another. They got agitated, the black one began to rotate on itself, and spikes appeared on the dark gray one. Black and dark gray bolts of lightning appeared between them.

  Renno woke up when that happened, or stopped pretending to be asleep. Her eyes popped, and she tried to speak something under the gag. When she saw I didn't give a damn, she started to trash her body and try to break free. I smiled. If it had gotten that reaction from her, I was on the right path.

  I had to rest a few more times before completing it. She didn't stop shaking her body for even a second, and it prevented me from meditating, but I was still able to recover all my MP and use it to enlarge the spheres.

  Lightning was now continuously forming between and around the spheres. The black one, made of liquid darkness energy, looked like an incredibly fast spinning ball and the dark gray one, made of smoky death energy, looked like a ball trying to explode but being blocked midway, steadily expanding and contracting.

  High Lady Renno was using all her mighty trying to break free by now, in a very desperate way. She hit me between the legs using her knees and did two damage to me like that. Two damage couldn't even begin to convey the pain I felt. Hope appeared in her eyes, and she quickly repeated the movement. I saw stars.

  But it was too late.

  I closed my eyes and added the final death energy. I opened my eyes and applied the last darkness energy. Both spheres touched.
>
  They vibrated.

  They stopped rotating and pulsating but vibrated at such a high rate that it created sound, a thick buzz, like a badly connected microphone. It began low and slowly increased in volume as the vibrations got faster. My whole body began to vibrate too, and I decided it was time. I would die, but I sure as hell would take that sadistic monster with me. In a quick move, I put her head right between both spheres.

  I expected the thing to blow, but it didn't. It was as if her head became a third sphere and began to vibrate with the other two, too fast to be healthy. It didn't take long for black blood to pour from her eyes, nose, mouth and ears in high amounts.

  Energy from both spheres slowly flowed to Renno's head. The different energies touched each other and light shone, illuminating the splashing blood in a yet more macabre scene. Soon all her head was shining, and the energies were going down from her head to her body, covering her in a glow too bright to directly look at.

  It was fine by me; it was past time to get the hell out of there anyway. I ran for my life and fell on the way, my lack of belts allowing my pants to fall. Holy shit, if I died because of this, I would never forgive myself. I took the pants off and resumed my crazy run. When I got to the double doors, the sound of the vibrations was so loud that I had to cover my ears, feeling blood pouring from them.

  The prison was inside a big cave chamber, but I didn't stop to look, I just run as far as I could. Surprisingly, the armored woman was there, looking at the prison. I had no idea why and didn't stop to ask, I just ran past her, pantless, blood pouring from my ears, eyes, and nose, hands on my head.

  Shai didn't try to stop me; she just stood there looking at the prison. I took a quick glance back and saw a bright light coming from inside the doors of the stone fortress, illuminating everything.

  Suddenly, the vibration stopped, and the light died.

  Shit. Am I still too near? Shit. Shit, shit, shit.

  I threw myself on the floor.

  The explosion came right after.

  I didn't hear it, already deaf by then. But I felt the crushing pressure from the shockwave and the hellfire that followed. It was like a damn dam of fire, darkness and death had broken loose.

  The fire came fast and hot and instantly melted my legs. A big stone block from the exploded prison fell over my left arm. There was so much pain that I couldn't even think straight enough to kill myself. Worst of all, the familiar coldness of death was healing me at the same time the fire damaged.

  Cold darkness energy was there too, making me mad between heat and cold, not even being allowed to accept the cold as something entirely good.

  It took forever, rapid streams of the three elements coming at me, death preventing me from dying.

  The fire melted the stone over my arm and the arm itself. Death grew the limb back around the molten rock in a weird, incomplete and painful way. It happened so many times that eventually the melted stone became the floor under the arm. The same thing happened with my chain armor and my chest.

  I only knew pain.

  After an eternity, my mind couldn't take it anymore and sank into blissful oblivion.

  * * *

  I woke up feeling like shit.

  I was mentally and physically exhausted, hurting everywhere. I tried to heal myself, but all I got was more pain and a message.

  18 pure damage dealt to yourself

  HP: 127 / 145

  A black lightning icon was right beside a black ear icon below my health bar. I willed them to show me their mysteries.

  Extreme Magical Backslash (level 5 – max)

  For 59 minutes, 59 seconds:

  » Cannot cast spells

  » Will not recover MP

  Trying to do any of the above actions will deal damage and reset the countdown.

  Complete Deafness (level 10 – max)

  Until you are magically healed, you are unable to hear

  A naked deaf deathlord in a cave without weapon nor magic, hurting all over. It was just perfect. I weakly got up and looked at the prison.

  Or, to be precise, at the place where a prison once stood.

  I was in a huge hole. A perfect ball with a hundred meters' diameter had been excavated in the cave floor, ceiling and walls. The prison had stood on the end of the cave chamber, and now nothing remained at the spot but black soot.

  There had been no fire magic on my part, so either Renno had used it before dying, or the two big spheres had somehow synced with the magic inside her. I would never know.

  There was a strange calmness in it now, after the explosion, that sat right with me. It matched the awful way my body and mind felt.

  My body hurt even more as I climbed out of the hole and saw prison debris everywhere. Stone, wood, metal, meat, bone and blood were all over the place.

  Thank the gaming gods, some loot for my trouble. Wait, is it what I should be thinking while looking at this scene?

  Deathlord Shai was some twenty meters away from me. Her armor was all cracked up and her helmet had half disintegrated. She was weakly trying to move a stone double my height which had fallen over her leg. She was also unable to cut her leg off: her big bastard sword was at my feet.

  I picked it up with difficulty and approached her. Her head had been badly burnt; there were almost no skin and only patches of burnt hair amidst the mess. Bloodied muscles moved as she tried to free herself.

  "You-" I tried to speak, but couldn't; it hurt too much.

  It was strange: she had not looked at me as I approached. As I got near, I saw why: she was deaf and blind, dried blood on both ears and eyes.

  Looking at the scene was too sad, even for an evil NPC like her. I could see black blood tears running down her face. I tried to move the stone, but it was just too big and too heavy. She couldn't see it and still tried, her fingerless burnt hand bloodied by the effort.

  I had never felt pity for an enemy before, but there is a first time for everything. With effort, I lifted the heavy sword above her leg and let it drop.

  She opened her mouth widely, so she must have screamed. I repeated my action. On the seventh drop, she became free of her leg, and blood poured freely from the stump.

  I found some ripped cotton clothes nearby and applied pressure to the wound, but it didn't stop. She had probably received an Open Wounds status effect, which would slowly kill her if not healed by either magic or medicine. I had neither.

  I searched the rubble for ten minutes, hurting all the way, but didn't find anything I could use. When I got back to her she was unmoving, tears flowing freely from her blind eyes. I put the sword in her hand. She took it with one hand and used the other to hold my hand strongly on hers. It hurt and did damage, but I didn't move. I had just unwillingly killed the poor creature.

  When she pointed the sword at her heart, I replaced her hands with mine on the handle. More than a few times in my life I had been close to doing what she was about to, and no one should have to do it.

  I looked straight into her blind eyes as I reaped the life out of her.

  Everything piled up: fear, anger, frustration, pain, exhaustion.

  I cried.

  * * *

  Hours and a few heals later; I was pillaging what I could. My seventy-seven silver coins and all my stuff were gone, either destroyed or melted away. All I had for my efforts until now was the black sword of the woman.

  The hilt was made of black metal, with a big black onyx on its pommel. The black blade had a sharp edge, but the dull made it a little unsightly. It was big and heavy, a bastard sword, to be used with both hands. The fact that Shai had been able to handle it single handed and still swing it at great speed was proof of her great strength.

  Deathlord Shai's Enchanted Darksteel Bastard Sword

  » 110 (+0 [Strength]) physical damage

  » 15 darkness damage

  It was crazy good, but when I tried to wield it, I got an irritating message.

  Status effect received: Massively Encumbered (leve
l 10 – max)

  You are using equipment too heavy for you.

  » -100% strength damage

  » -100% agility (6 -> 0)

  » +100% stamina consumption

  I could still move, but raising the sword to swing it was impossible. When I didn't think of it as a weapon, but just as another item that I was carrying, the status effect disappeared. No status effect meant I didn't get the penalties, but the sword remained heavy and impossible for me to lift without effort.

  There were a few blinking exclamation points on the edge of my vision, but it felt wrong to check my rewards after what I had done to Shai. I knew this was a game, but that had been intense.

  Back to pillaging, I found nothing useful. Maybe because when I had been in the prison I had taken the equipment of all the enemies I had killed. Except for the stuff from the ghouls I had killed after binding Renno, but they had been too close to the explosion, and I couldn't find any undamaged and usable equipment. It seemed the smart thing to do at the time, carrying everything I could, but now it meant I couldn't find a corpse part with some cloth for me to pillage.

  I had no choice but to leave half naked.

  Something caught my attention when I looked at the crater for a final time: a spot where the soot looked a little different. I moved around to confirm I could see it from different angles, then went there to check on it, passing by the small mound that now contained Shai's remains. I had thought of taking her armor, but it was too wrecked to be any good.

  First, I found Renno's circlet. Then, feeling like an idiot for not having thought of looking for her items, I searched all the damn crater, founding only an extra ring for my efforts.

  Circlet of Enlightenment

  Legendary

  A special circlet forged by the dwarves, enchanted by the elves, stolen by the drow, perfected by the sorins, bought by the vampires and conquered by the deathlords.

  » +10 magic

  » +10 perception