Another spear shot out from behind the fallen Werewolf. It couldn’t possibly hit its next target that stood about eight feet away, but as it reached the peak of its physical extension, I saw energy extend from the tip of the spear that cleared the distance and impaled the other Werewolf in the kidney.
As the first Werewolf fell to the floor dead, a surprise appeared behind it, pulling his spear back and readying it for another attack.
“Travis?!” I cried.
He had just one-hit a Werewolf three times his level.
The Pack Leader was on him before he could respond or redirect his attack.
As soon as Travis had arrived, he was finished.
The Werewolf lunged, clearing a dozen feet in a split second. With its clawed hand larger than a human head, he slashed at Travis’s chest.
With impossible agility, Travis bent back at the waist and dragged the blade of his spear against the monster’s arm.
Jumping back, Travis started to backpedal in my direction.
I quickly made it to his side, casting Advanced Heal on him as I came.
“Sorry I’m late!” he called with an obnoxious grin.
“You shouldn’t be here,” I rebuked.
It was then that I saw the Pack Leader grabbing at the scratch that Travis had left him. The creature’s arm twitched.
“Lydia’s poison!” Travis boasted.
I looked to the double-bladed spear point of Travis’s weapon and saw an odd concentration of black and green light coming from it through Mana Sight.
“Of course!” I said.
Energy filled my sword, transforming the bone into a long, straight, double-sided blade that resembled a claymore.
I hadn’t tested the Necrotoxin Blue Magic that I had stolen from the Trapdoor Spider, but still, I applied it to one edge of my sword. It cost a base of 100 mana per minute at level 1, but with my passives, it only cost 20. On the other edge, Light Magic shone brightly as I fed it a much more expensive 100 mana per minute coating.
“Do you have any silver?” Travis asked.
I glanced at him from the corner of my eye, and he cackled like a crazed hyena.
It looked like about half of the Werewolves had survived my Advanced Health Bomb. With Travis at my side, they swamped us.
Fighting creatures just as fast as we were made their numbers a great advantage. But as the first claw swung for my face, I learned that all I had to do was block.
My Light-charged blade sizzled through the monster’s arm like red-hot metal through butter. I almost expected sparks to fly, but none came.
Suddenly emboldened, I shouldered the feral beast and dragged my blade through its torso.
Turning to see if Travis needed a hand, what I saw left me hardly believing my eyes. As he stabbed at the monster’s chest, the blade of his weapon seemed to splinter. Each segment of his spear solidified into a spearhead of its own and seven spear points jabbed into the mob’s stomach and chest. One caught it in the mouth.
The blow wasn’t nearly as powerful as his first one had been where all seven spear points had impaled the poor beast, but with so many wounds from a single attack, he was doing impressive amounts of damage.
It occurred to me that I really had very little idea what my fellow captives were capable of. Remembering Travis also had a talent with piercing weapons it was clear that his abilities were beyond my expectation.
Although, I wasn’t able to completely go on the offensive, coating my weapon with the Light Magic saved me mana and allowed me to cut away at their high HP with ease.
Even though it took almost all of my remaining mana per minute, I cast Advanced Rejuvenation on Travis and rebuffed him. As he realized what I was doing, he turned it up a notch.
It was then that I saw what it meant to have a talent in Dexterity. Even though each of the Werewolves had 1,000 Dexterity as well, he danced around them like they were drunken overweight teddy bears. Ugly ones.
We whittled them down until the Pack Leader shouldered his way forward and sent me sprawling to my rear. He had already recovered from the poison.
Not to waste time, I removed a few legs of the lesser Werewolves close by, watching warily as the Pack Leader turned his attention to Travis.
Travis’s talent couldn’t make up the distance between 1,000 and 2,000 Dexterity. His spear didn’t stop moving as he scrambled to stay alive. There was no extended spear and his spear remained a single point as he fought back. It seemed there was a countdown of some kind to use his skills.
To reach him, I stepped into a vicious slash, taking it high on the shoulder as I buried my sword in one of the last couple of Werewolves alive. My armor took the brunt of the force but needed another 50 MP to fuse it together in places.
I was too late.
The Pack Leader swatted at Travis’s spear.
When Travis drew it back to reposition for a better angle, he shifted his weight back. The Werewolf saw the shift and lunged. With its lower jaw fully extended, the monster chomped down. Travis’s entire shoulder disappeared beneath the Werewolf’s massive jaws.
Travis howled.
Advanced Heal flew from my left hand as I wielded my sword in my right.
The Werewolf stood tall in response, lifting Travis from the floor.
Heat rose up, reddening my face as I grit my teeth.
The last of the Pack Leader’s Werewolves placed itself between me and my friend. It charged with both claws out, ready to strike.
Lowering my head, I met the beast’s charge with one of my own. Sending Light Magic funneling into the horns at the top of my head, I buried them deep into the creature’s gut.
Ripping my head from the monster’s torso, I brought my sword up through its groin and out the side by its ribs.
Seeing the Pack Leader was struggling with the Light Magic filling my friend, but still not letting go, I bellowed a primal cry as I stormed toward him.
He let him go and turned to face me. Travis fell to the ground in a crumpled mess.
I didn’t stop.
As enraged as I was, an understanding of what it meant to control magic, really control it, had started to bloom in my mind.
This creature was faster than I was. It was stronger than I was. I was at death’s doorstep with no logical reason to think I would win.
As its massive claw sped for my chest, my fist flew to intercept it.
A flash of yellow light shone for but a moment as his attack met mine. For the cost of only 100 MP, the quick flash of excessively condensed Light Magic applied to my bone gauntlet tore through the palm of his hand.
-15,385HP
His size still pushed me back, but my rage faded, replaced with focused spite. As he attacked me, Light Magic met his every move. With small bursts of concentrated energy, I was able to conserve MP and turn each of his attacks into pain-filled defeat.
He slashed low.
Light Magic materialized on my breastplate where his claws connected. It ate away at his flesh.
Instead of stepping back to analyze the situation, the pain infuriated him, and he went into a frenzy. His blows came so quickly that it was impossible for my body to react. Yet, I destroyed him.
Even if my body couldn’t keep up with him, my mind could. Since I wasn’t casting a spell but concentrating mana at different points all over my body, it was easier than flexing a muscle, and just as quick. The bone armor I wore was a perfect conductor of the magic itself since it was void of any magic of its own.
I was battered back and forth, but because of the disparity between our mana, I blunted all of his attacks. Titan’s Bone Defense handled the rest.
With tattered limbs, the Pack Leader arched its head back and howled. It was the pathetic cry of knowing you're defeated.
I lifted my gleaming sword and slowly drove it up into the monster’s chest.
Out of habit, I cast Lesser Blood Drain on the creature as I rushed to Travis’s side.
He had made it to his feet but was leanin
g forward, holding tight to his spear with one hand as the other dug into the meat of his chest. He had seen what had happened to me and Audrey. He was pulling leather out of his wound so it could heal.
“How did you do that?” Travis asked behind gritted teeth as he continued to work.
“My mana was more compressed than his, so his attacks hurt him,” I said, more than happy to answer his question to help divert his attention.
It had only been possible because we had opposing Alignments. Light and Dark magic reacted when they came in contact with one another. What I had discovered when watching the Werewolf trying to make Travis a snack and attacking the other Werewolves myself with an edge of compressed Light was that there was no reason I couldn’t use this reaction. I could master it. All that I had to do to win the exchange was have a denser concentration of mana than my opponent.
Had the Head Mistress meant to discourage me from figuring this out when she allowed her succubus friend to reward me by attacking me with Dark Magic? Perhaps that wasn’t her intention, but now that I knew, I didn’t have to fear Dark Magic as something impossible to defend against. Sure, I had to filter the energy into an item like my armor or sword to keep from getting hurt, for if Dark Magic touched my skin, even if I condensed my Light Magic there to win the exchange, my body would feel the effects of the impact. I would take damage even if I won out. It seemed possible though that there might be a way to reduce if not eliminate the damage. It certainly wasn’t something I was excited about experimenting with.
The mobs around us seemed to hesitate, wary of renewing their full-on assault. More of them than before were now feeding on the corpses of others.
“There,” Travis said with a grunt.
I didn’t have to heal him again, Rejuvenation did its job, returning him to full strength.
“Maybe they’ve had enough,” he said.
I couldn’t help but laugh.
“You’d let all this experience get away?” I teased.
“Eh. If you put it that way,” he said with a snicker. “Actually, yeah I would.”
“Same,” I agreed.
The moment of calm was bittersweet. A blue beetle the size of a golf cart with silver speckles on its shell burst through the crowd to our flank. It had pinchers for a mouth that were as long as my arm. The greedy insect reminded the rest of them that a couple of delicacies stood right before them.
I took up my sword with both hands once again to face the onslaught, this time with Travis at my side.
Chapter 18 – Magic From Above
How long had I been at this? An hour? Two? How many hundreds of creatures had I killed before Travis had even arrived. Could it have already reached a thousand?
I broke my own rule and glanced at my stats.
Level: 494
Mana Points: 28,901/161,777
Mana Per Minute: 4,392
Wisdom: 2071
I couldn’t believe it. I had gained 127 levels. All the while I had been upping Wisdom but had been too desperate trying to survive to notice that it was over 2k and my mana per minute was over a thousand more than I had been calculating in my head. Even after all the armor and sword repairs, then having to use 5,000 mana on a Health Bomb, my mana pool was far higher than I thought!
Perhaps, we might make it out of this after all.
There was no time to examine my other popups.
The giant beetle was of the Nature Element, so I converted my bone claymore into a battle axe with a gnarly spike opposite the axe blade and coated it with Necrotoxin. Stepping to the side to let it pass, I drove the spike end into the top of its shell.
Almost immediately, it started to squirm as the Necrotoxin took effect. A few moments later, green goo spurt out all over like a fountain of liquid bug guts.
As Travis and I fought side by side, I started to experiment with coating my axe blade with different kinds of magic. Light Magic worked great against Dark Magic beings but had almost no effect on other elements. Since everything had some kind of core of Dark or Light Mana, it was hard to know what effect Light Magic would have. I was blind to the creature’s core unless I killed it, used Force Learn, or just got lucky.
Moving on from Light Magic, I experimented with Ice, Fire, Sonic and Alpha Magic. The Elements of Ice and Fire didn’t help as much as I would have hoped. Once again, it wasn’t like the games I had played, but that didn’t mean they might not be useful in the future. I started to suspect that in order for Fire or Ice to really become useful I would just need to have them at an excessive temperature. I didn’t waste the mana to find out.
Sonic Magic followed different rules than all the other schools. I couldn’t just coat my blade with a layer of Sonic Energy without turning my sword into a quivering mess. Instead, I had to revert to casting the spell from the sweet spot of my weapon in the same way I had when fighting Earth Elementals.
Alpha Bolt was also unique because of its characteristics. One, it was made up of Neutral Magic, or pure energy, without the taint of an Element or Alignment. It did allow me to coat my blade, but the result when connecting with an enemy was that it repelled whatever I hit, giving it a knockback characteristic. The impact also pushed back against my axe, causing damage to it at the same time it damaged the enemy. To get around this, I formed my axe into a great maul that could handle the impact.
My maul smacked a four-foot-tall goblin in the chest, driving its obsidian knife from its hand. With help of the velocity of the swing, the condensed Neutral Magic launched the monster into its buddies a few meters behind it.
Goblin bowling!
Travis jabbed a spider in the eye, before dancing back and stabbing two Were-coons who were trying to avoid being crushed by the spider’s flailing body. His spear extended on his next attack and went all the way through the spider’s head, stopping it from further waltzing about in panic. The three creatures fell neatly in a pile.
We continued to fight what seemed like endless waves of monsters. With Rejuvenation also restoring our stamina, what would have normally been our downfall, our endurance, was now our strength. There was no way to know how long it would take, but we both felt it. We would outlast them all.
If another pack of Werewolves appeared, we would handle it. Giant bugs, goblins, and gargoyles had nothing on us. I was starting to grow confident. Then, a ball of fire landed at my feet and exploded, sending dirt and rocks in all directions.
I only staggered back a foot, but I started looking around frantically to see where the magic had come from. It was no use. There was no creature in the vicinity that I knew to be capable of such an attack.
“Magic!” I called, warning Travis.
He started to search for the origin as well as he tossed a gargoyle aside.
It was dangerously close when I saw another Fireball coming at us from high overhead. No wonder I hadn’t see the source. It was coming from above.
There had to be close to one hundred Imps flocking toward us from the direction of the Crystalis. Dozens of bolts from nearly every school of magic were already speeding our way.
I found it hard to swallow.
Releasing my grip on the sword in my left hand, I summoned Skeleton Warrior’s Shield and pumped an extra 300 mana per minute into it. Instead of the chest-sized round shield, the bone shield extended out until it resembled a gothic surfboard. My Bone Maul shrunk in size at my command to resemble a Bone Morningstar with vicious spikes.
I placed my shield between me and the next explosion of fire.
“Run!” I cried, plowing my way through the wall of mobs in, what I guessed, was the direction of the cavern we had used to enter the Belly.
I knew Xaphan had warned me not to run, but somehow, we needed to find a place to shield us from the incoming downpour of magic. I would get us to the entrance and have Travis run for it. Then, I would figure something out.
It wasn’t long before Travis was at my side helping to carve a line out of the mass of monsters.
The Imp’s
spells started to arrive where we had been standing. There was a great outcry as the creatures that fell in behind us were mangled under the onslaught of magic.
I hadn’t wanted to hit an Imp in the face so badly in days. The worst part was, because of their talent with magic, they were far more dangerous than any creatures we had faced in the Belly. Even more dangerous than the Werewolves.
We hadn’t gone far when a stone bullet knocked a were-rat upside the head just a few meters in front of me. From the flock of Imps’ vantage point, for them to lead our retreat with their magic was as easy as turning their heads.
I let my Advance Healing Aura extend to speed our retreat. It fried the lesser mobs weak against Light Magic. With a little room to work with, I turned my attention to the Imps.
It didn’t look like some Advanced Healing Fireworks would do any good. There were some Imps that would likely be weak to Light Magic among them, but there were also Fire Imps, like the ones I had run across in the Head Mistress’s dungeon, and numerous other kinds. From what I could tell there was a different kind of Imp for every school of magic. All except Light Magic.
My MP had reached just over 30k. It was building, but not as quickly as we needed. I fired off a few low-cost Alpha Bullets just to give them something to think about, but they were far enough away that they were easily able to dodge. Dodging their spells wouldn’t be so easy. We were still surrounded by hundreds of mobs.
There was no choice but to lead us away from the place where I hoped we would find some shelter. I lifted my shield to block a brown spore the size of a baseball. A glistening green powder burst forth from it, leaving a thick cloud in its wake.
I jumped back to keep from breathing it in and was assaulted by an ant-headed bigfoot-looking creature that tried to pinch my face off. When it couldn’t reach my head, it grabbed my shield. Rejecting its invitation for a friendly kiss, I removed its pumpkin head with a backhanded swing of my morningstar. That was easy.
Underworld - Through the Belly of the Beast: A LitRPG Series Page 19