Freya turned to the beast, her hand at shoulder level. I heard her speak a word, and a bright flash of light broke into the air as an orb emerged. The snake recoiled, backing away from the sudden light, and Freya took the opportunity by the neck. A blast of wind spurred behind her as she shot across the ground, thudding into the beast and sinking her blade deep into its skin. The snake squirmed and hissed as pain coursed through its body.
I looked to its health bar and noticed it go down by tiny fraction, maybe about a twentieth. It wasn’t good but it wasn’t too bad either. I started to make my move towards it, my first few steps weird as I got used to the Agility boost on me. I charged down, getting within a few yards of it before it noticed me. I stopped short and jumped to the side as it lunged at me, its teeth slicing into the rocks. I immediately pushed myself off the ground, making a step and then a leap onto the back of its head.
“Let’s see if this works,” I grinned. “Heavy swing!” I yelled, summoning my newer sword skill. My move landed hard, making a shallow cut on its skin, but did less damage than Freya’s attack.
The beast jerked its body, throwing me off its head. I put my hand down and rolled as I hit the ground, the stray shards of marble and stone bruising me as I slid across them.
“Zoran,” Freya knelt next to me. “I need you to buy me some time.”
“How long?” I asked, my eyes on the snake, my mind not wondering what Freya needed the time for.
“Twenty seconds.”
“You got it,” I said.
I flicked my Ga’em menu open, switching to the Equipment Inventory in half a second and equipping a weapon in even shorter time. A stream of light collected in my hand, forming a massive mace a second later.
I grinned. I’m taking you down, I charged the snake, getting surprisingly aggressive with my move.
The Desert Snake seemed confused for a second but quickly snapped out it and sprang at me instead.
Just what I wanted, I lowered my body weight and slid across the ground, coming to a stop just as the snake was about to sink its fangs into me. I focused all my strengths into my wrists and threw the club at its head.
“Weapon Shatter!” I yelled. The club smacked into the top end of the snake and immediately exploded, causing a shockwave that threw me back to the floor.
The beast squirmed in pain, retreating back for a second. I looked up to its health bar as I pulled myself back onto my feet, noticing that about half of its health had been completely taken down.
Time for the final act then, I smiled.
“Bet you like fire big guy,” I grinned as the beast’s form slithered to me again. “Asgionis,” I said and a flame shrouded my body, increasing my agility even higher.
The snake turned agitated and sprung at me, faster than I’d expected, its fangs ready to snap me in two. I stood there undeterred and threw my hand into the air, palms pointed right at the beast’s open mouth.
“Erkiela!”
A blast of flames surged out from around me, eating into the creature.
“Zoran, Move!” I heard Freya yell and I charged blindly to the side, completely trusting her.
I heard her utter a word, the sound echoing through the chamber.
A twister of wind summoned from the floor, howling through the air. It caught the snake and trapped it, suffocating it within. I watched as beast’s remaining health went down to zero. Just like that. The wind quickly died away, revealing a massive snake coiled silently on the floor.
Dead.
DING!
You have defeated Desert Snake (Level 71). Reward: 10000XP. Reward: Fang of the Desert Snake.
DING!
Congratulations! Your Swordsmanship skill has now increased to Level 6. Agility will now be increased by +6% while wielding a sword.
Congratulations! Your special move, Bladestorm, has now increased to Level 3. Attack will hit 7 times a second with each strike causing %70 of the weapon’s max attack damage. Increases critical hit chance by +6%. Cost: 30 Mana. Duration: 6 seconds. Cooldown: 10 minutes.
Congratulations! Your special move, Heavy Swing, has now increased to Level 2. Attack causes 220% max damage of weapon. Aftershocks from strike cause more additional damage to nearby enemies. Cost: None. Duration: None. Cooldown: 5 minutes.
DING!
Congratulations! Your Fire Arts skill has now increased to Level 2. Attack Damage will now be increased by +11% in the presence of extreme heat.
TING!
Congratulations! You have learnt a new Fire Arts Spell: Incineration Beam, ‘Oskis’. Fires a beam of intense flames straight at a target. Strong chances of inflicting burn status on target. Strength diminishes the further away target is. Cost: 40 Mana. Duration: 5 seconds. Cooldown: 5 minutes.
DING!
Congratulations! Your Night Vision Skill has now increased to Level 2. You will now be able to make out more intricate features of objects in the darkness.
DING!
Congratulations! Your Stealth Skill has now increased to Level 2. Enemies will find it harder to notice you. Moves performed immediately after coming out of stealth are increased by +10% Attack.
That’s a ton of levelling I just did, I thought. I walked up to Freya, noticing that the elf was going through a few screens as well. She probably leveled up too, I realized, wondering whether her levelling up actually meant anything since her seal cut off her true strength.
“Well, that went easier than I thought,” she smiled as she turned to me.
“Yeah,” I said. “Your Wind Arts are pretty strong.”
“That was only because I managed to break my seal a little,” she said. “Regular old me wouldn’t have been able to do something like that.”
“Oh,” I said a little monotonously.
“Yeah, that’s what I wanted the twenty seconds for,” she said. “To pry my seal open a bit.”
A flash of ghastly grey light suddenly burst into the chamber and a string of words descended the air, chanted by someone from high above us.
Pain struck my mind and I collapsed to the floor, breathing hard. What the hell? I thought as I glanced up, trying to make out what was going on.
“Zoran!” Freya grabbed my hand, turning me around.
“What?” I mumbled and looked ahead. “Oh god,” I froze.
Runes of grey were now glowing on the body of the Desert Snake, and the very beast itself was stirring. A health bar appeared next to it and quickly filled back up to its full capacity, as though it had never been killed. The snake’s eyes slowly opened, its coiled body raising itself high above me once again.
My heart thudded hard, the sound rumbling my ears. Panic filled my mind. The beast sat before me in all its glory, its eyes a full gray, its forked tongue hissing at me and Freya.
My thoughts immediately cut off, muddling down to one word.
“Run!” Freya yelled, grabbing my hand and pulling me out in front of her. She threw her hands up in the air and muttered a word. A blast of bright light summoned right in front of the snake, blinding it completely. The beast shook for a few seconds, trying to regain its sight while we charged across the dark floor.
Freya ran up to my side. “There,” she said, pointing to our right. A collection of rubble stood there, pillars of broken marble blocking a small entrance.
“But that’s blocked off,” I said as we ran there. “We can’t-”
Freya slid out of her sword and surged to the rubble at breakneck pace. She swung hard at it and the marble shattered to pieces. Just like that.
“C’mon!” she yelled. I heard slithering from behind me and turned around to see the snake racing after me, making up for the distance keeping us apart.
My legs picked up the pace, nearly tripping as I raced to the human-sized entrance. Freya had her hands in the air, ready to cast a spell and push back the beast. I kept my eyes straight and charged, surging to the entrance and diving past it.
“Lori!” Freya yelled immediately and a blast of wind stormed out
of her palms, smacking into the snake and pushing it back.
She cut off her spell a few seconds later and stood still for a moment, breathing easy only when it seemed certain the sounds of the snake had disappeared. Of course, Freya knew it hadn’t been killed, but she also seemed confident the snake couldn’t come through the small entrance. “You okay?” she walked up to me.
“Those runes…” I said as I got up, dusting the mud off my pants.
“Yeah,” she bit her lip. “That thing was brought back from the dead using a tortured wraith as well.”
“Phantom Lord?” I asked.
“I don’t see who else would be capable of something like this,” she said. “Are you okay now?”
“Yeah…” I said, pressing my head. Why did I feel that pain before? I asked myself. My eyes widened. The Death Seal, I thought, realizing the Phantom Lord’s presence could have caused it to react, resulting in the pain in my head.
I wonderied if coming here really was a good idea after all. I’d been eager to meet this Phantom Lord, to ask him why he was messing around with me, why he was coming after me, but now I wasn’t so sure I was okay with doing something like that.
A wind blew through the air, sending a chill down my spine.
Suddenly, patches of light appeared in the corners of the room. I looked to Freya, wondering what kind of spell she had cast, but to my surprise, the elf stood there with her eyes wide, looking more surprised than I was.
“Freya?” I asked.
The lights around us dissolved away and a group of wraiths floated in through the walls, ghastly grey in their eyes and horrid screams on their lips. I backed up immediately, my hands going to my sword but my mind realizing it was useless to do so.
Freya uttered a word and the blast of white light hit the room. The wraiths shrieked in pain, but kept moving forward, albeit at a slightly slower pace.
Physical attacks don’t work on them, I remembered.
“What the hell are all these spirits doing here?” Freya muttered, standing close to me.
“I don’t know,” I said, turning around, standing back to back with her. Time to use the new spell then, I lifted my hand up, focusing on my palm. “Oskis!” I yelled and a flame blast out of me, surging into the nearest wraith and making it shriek. I turned my body, letting the flames sink into as many wraiths as I could before the move shut off. I quickly glanced at the health bars around me. They hadn’t even sunk down to a half, and the wraiths were still moving actively towards us.
“We don’t have any way out,” I mumbled.
“Sure we do,” Freya pulled her sword up, holding it there for a second and sinking it down into stone floor. The surface immediately cracked, opening up and taking us down with it. Freya’s hand latched onto mine as we fell, and she summoned her wind spell once again, letting us fall slowly to whatever was beneath us.
I steadied myself as I felt my feet land on something hard, pulling out of the elf’s hold and reorienting myself to whatever was around me. Freya stood beside me and cast a Light Arts spell, summoning the orb of light she had used before. A white light shone over our near vicinity, giving us sight to a small part of the surroundings.
I looked up, noticing the opening in the roof high above us, but none of the Wraiths seemed to be coming through. I was suspicious of why, but I wasn’t complaining. That was one less thing that we had to worry about now.
“Zoran,” I felt Freya’s hand on my shoulder. “I think I know where all those tortured Wraiths came from.”
“What?” I turned around and my eyes instantly widened.
We were not in a room that was empty, but one that was full of one thing.
Dead bodies.
***
CHAPTER NINETEEN
It took a while for my heart to start beating again.
I pulled my eyes away from the pile of bodies in front of me. It wasn’t that I couldn’t handle the sight of death. It was just that I couldn’t handle the concept of these many people being killed just to make tortured wraiths. I could see men, women and children all in the large pile of bodies. Even though they were piled tight on top of each other, the pack occupied a little more than half the room, the group of bodies bloodied and red.
“Something isn’t right here,” Freya stepped forward.
“Freya?” I asked. “Hey?” I walked behind her, a little worried she might be looking too into this. I’d already had enough with seeing the Desert Snake resurrect. I sure as hell didn’t want to put up with an undead army right now.
“Look,” she walked up to the closest body, a middle-aged man clad in torn armor and ripped clothing. She knelt down and shifted his body, pulling up a section of his armor and clothing.
“Freya, what are you doing?” I cringed, hoping these bodies didn’t suddenly spur to life.
“Look at this, you idiot,” she bared a part of the man’s chest and there, on the skin over his heart, were two deep cuts made in a neat X-cross pattern. She quickly moved over to the next man, this one younger, and did the same thing, finding a similar scar over his heart as well.
“They all have it,” she looked up at me.
“What the hell?” I blinked, confused.
“These people weren’t just murdered,” she turned to the pile of death. “They were sacrificed.”
“But since the tortured wraiths came from these people, doesn’t that imply they were sacrificed?”
“Tortured Wraiths can be made from any kind of death, not necessarily only a sacrifice,” she said. “This mass murder though seems to have been for some other reason and I can’t tell what.”
“Can you tell who did this?” I asked.
“Well, I can tell for sure that the tortured Wraiths came from these bodies,” she said. “And we do know that the Phantom Lord has quite an expert hand at creating such terrifying spirits.”
To be honest, I was not surprised at all. I’d expected that answer from her. At this point it’d be surprising if the Phantom Lord was not involved in something bad that had happened to me.
What does he even want with me? I asked myself, still missing that key piece of information. At the moment, it seemed like the only way to find that out was to actually meet the Phantom Lord, and I really wished there was another way.
A howl rang through the air and I immediately glanced up, only to see the wispy grey forms of the wraiths sink down to us. Freya threw herself in front of me before I could even react and uttered a word. Her hands moved in a circle, drawing a rune that quickly expanded out, creating a dome of light over us.
The spirits stopped short of the wall, not willing to touch it. And that made perfect sense to me since wraiths were extremely weak to the Light Arts.
“These things are more persistent than I’d thought,” Freya muttered.
And in the time it had taken her to say that sentence, five more wraiths had appeared. I quickly used my analyze screen on them, confirming that they were all tortured wraiths and noticing that they were around Level 25 on average.
“I’ve bought us some time for now,” the elf said, lowering her hands. “The shield will last us a for a bit, but I don’t know what to do about the Wraiths. We can’t keep hiding under the shield but if we try to leave it, the spirits are going to come after us, and we know what happens then.”
Shudders went through me as I remembered the pain I’d felt before from just passing through a tortured Wraith. I definitely did not want to go through that again.
“What do we do?” I asked,
“My shield will hold up for about another minute or so,” she said. “And I can’t cast it for another ten minutes after.”
“Damn,” I said. That meant we had less than a minute now to come up with a plan to get us out of this. That didn’t seem like enough time.
I looked at Freya. “Brute force?”
“I do have a light spell I could use,” she said.
“Okay, here’s what you should do,” I said. “As soon as the shiel
d breaks, get past the wraiths for like a second. I need like ten seconds to cast my Blast Burn spell. That should take down about a third of the Wraith’s health and give them a burn status effect. You can come in immediately after and start picking them off.”
“Done,” she said. “We’re almost at twenty seconds before shield comes down.”
I nodded and put my hand up in the air, focusing on my thoughts and imagining all my strength concentration on my palm.
“Three…Two…One,” Freya counted down. “Zero!”
The shield dissolved and the Wraiths instantly surged forward. Freya jumped into the air, twisting around, planting her foot on the ceiling and pushing herself well clear of the mess. I immediately seized the chance, throwing my hands in the air and uttering my keyword.
“Erkiela!” I yelled. Blast burn activated as the Wraiths moved onto me and the flames spun out, consuming the spirits in red and orange, sending them into panic with the heat. My eyes glanced at the health bars all around me, noticing them go down by a little less than a third.
Freya jumped back into the center of the action, her arms poised in front of her. She cast her spell from the Light Arts and a bright flash shot into the room. The Wraiths shrieked in pain and backed away, just like they had earlier on. I took full chance of the opportunity and cast my Incineration beam skill.
“Oskis!” I yelled, summoning my spell. A blast of fire shot out of my palms and I directed it at the spirits, just like I had when I faced them a few minutes ago. “You never learn, do you?” I muttered as two wraiths fell prey to my attack, their health going to zero and their bodies dissolving instantly.
I felt wind around me, and a twister summoned from under the floor ahead, shooting up into the air and causing the whole room to vibrate a little. I stepped back, letting Freya finish the last few Wraiths with her Wind Arts. It took about ten seconds and the Wraiths were all gone.
The Eternal: Awakening - A LitRPG Saga (World of Ga'em Book 1) Page 19