by Konrad Ryan
Despite her pale, poisoned state, the girl panthervoid stabbed her huge two-handed sword into the chest of the minotaur, pressing him even harder against Fangshredder’s bite. These voids were battle hardened, and even without previous experience fighting together, they used the openings each other’s movements and attacks created. They were like the spectres of Zero that played in Tad’s head. Cold and fast, likely, they wouldn’t hesitate to backstab each other should the opportunity arise. They were skilled, unlike most soldier rank slayers Tad had met. Each dangerous in their own right.
Tad couldn’t help but wonder what circumstances created voids. Why were they so cold-hearted? So determined. Were they trained to be like this? If so, why hadn’t he been trained as well?
One thing was for sure.
The minotaur didn’t stand a chance.
The minotaur’s health bar dropped to below fifty percent from the violent combination assault. Despite its speed, it couldn’t keep up with four competent voids with deadly intentions. This would be over soon.
Almost in answer to his arrogance, an alarm rang inside Tad’s head.
*Warning. The boss has cast ‘Maze of the Minotaur.’ Warning!*
The battle arena plunged once more into darkness. Stealth vision activated a moment later, but he stood in a different place. The tiles and stone of the floor were the same, but obsidian walls trapped him on three sides. They stretched upward where an obsidian ceiling blocked the roof, twenty feet up.
Tad tapped the alert and hastily read the description of the spell the boss had just cast. His previous confidence was shattered.
It was their turn to be hunted.
Chapter 17
*Maze of the Minotaur: Change the battlescape to a labyrinth. Teleport the four combatants to different starting areas.*
The suspense had peaked. The minotaur had already gone through the walls, and now he was surrounded. Tad jogged through the maze, behind his perception tendrils. They snaked out and mapped the corridors ahead, but he had gone through so many twists and turns, that he was utterly lost. Sounds of battle had died down. Twice he had seen light around a distant corner, but nothing had been there when he had investigated moments later, his tendril hadn’t arrived in time.
Tad had banished Fangshredder. It would be no use in these close quarters. Instead, he gripped Raekast’s hiltless handle in one hand. At any second, the minotaur could attack him. From any side. He had to be at the ready. An alert rang through his mind, causing him to jump almost an entire foot, swinging his weapon wildly.
*Void defeated. 3 voids remain. Void essence absorbed, the minotaur grows stronger.*
Which one had it been? Surely not the lionvoid, he was too strong, too fast. It had to be one of the girls. The panthervoid or the bunnyvoid. Tad shivered despite himself, reading the alert for a second time. Void essence. The apparition that had been inside his dagger hadn’t been normal. It had been black; it had even dripped with darkness, but lacked a physical form. Essence was supposed to gleam golden and shine, filled with energy, but not so with the apparition. Not only that, but it had been sentient, who ever heard of a sentient essence. His banshee essence could play music and wave her violin bow at other monster essence, but didn’t respond to anything else. The demented void must have been void essence.
Tad’s own essence would be the same. He knew it inherently. His soul was as inky black as the rest of them, and the minotaur could absorb them. He had even seen it once, when black tendrils had escaped his fist before he smashed them into the ground, harvesting the enormous boulders in the harpy dungeon.
Well, it had been called a void minotaur, hadn’t it? It even had used the equipment system to store its enormous axe. The other three had looked more like animals than even Zero had. The only thing strange-looking about Zero was his ears. He had lacked them, a bit of scaled skin was in their stead.
Too many questions ran through his mind. He tried to push them away and concentrate. Clearly the minotaur was hunting them one by one. His turn could start any second. That it hadn’t started, meant that the minotaur was likely in a battle with one of the other voids. Tad had to hurry. If they teamed up, their odds of survival increased drastically.
The obsidian walls were hard to distinguish in the colorless view that stealth vision granted. Suddenly, he wished he had brought a lightsphere as one of his four items as the lionvoid had. If the others didn’t have stealth vision, they wouldn’t be able to see him. He would have to rely on finding them.
And only one of them had a light.
Increasing his pace, he sped through the corridors as fast as he could. There had to be a hint of how this place worked, but he couldn’t find any. Passageways that had been there before, had disappeared the next instant when he tried to backtrack.
Once again, the thought pressed from the back of his mind. He needed light. It would help others find him. His spells. He knew they were the answer, but he didn’t have one that provided sustained light besides firewall, and that was excessively wasteful, not to mention stationary. But he had seen people change the form of spells, and had even done it himself a few times, but the practice he had done with healing had proved more difficult than he had thought.
He envisioned the spell floating in a wheel above his hand.
“Thunderbolt!”
The spell illuminated the darkness and was in the proper wheel shape, but it shot off and smashed into one of the obsidian walls to no effect. Most of the time, the explosive momentum from his spells was what he wanted, but not now. He focused harder on it floating in place, visualizing it with more clarity than before.
“Thunderbolt.”
The lightning formed into a wheel of crackling electricity above the palm of his hand. But it did not follow or track his hand. Changing colors, or size of the spell had always been simple, but changing the function was difficult. The bright white light illuminated the labyrinth, but what had been confusing before suddenly made sense. Two sections of wall, among maybe fifty, reflected the light. The other sections didn’t hold the light, instead it slipped and twisted over them. Those remained as black as they had in the darkness. Tad ran to one of the reflecting walls and pressed with his might. He flipped through the door effortlessly, but his excessive force sent him reeling through the wall into the bunnyvoid. His momentum smashed into her, knocking her from her feet. A high-pitch bellow of rage pealed from Tad’s right, the minotaur charged through an inky black section of wall, its remaining horn just missed impaling the bunnyvoid, and disappeared through one surface that the light didn’t touch on the other side of the small hallway. A second bellow rang from Tad’s left, he spun to meet it, Raekast’s Fang struck toward the minotaur face, Tad’s free hand grabbed the flat part of the minotaur’s remaining horn. His muscles bulged with effort, his dagger caught the minotaur just below the eye, it recoiled from the pain, just enough for Tad to slip past the minotaur’s charge, away from the wall he had almost been pinned to. The minotaur slid through the wall, like the banshee did through flesh. A chill echoed down Tad’s spine at the image.
In a flash, the scorpion tail alone reappeared from the inky black wall and struck toward Tad’s neck. He deflected the strike with Raekast’s Fang, then Tad rolled from the position, where the stinger struck again.
A bolt of acid covered the tail with a hiss. The caster of the spell had been the bunnyvoid. A panicked bellow escaped from behind the wall, and then silence.
Both Tad and the bunnyvoid held their breath. They stood back to back, waiting for their attacker, but no attacks came.
It must have gone for the third void.
“Sorry about knocking you over, I didn’t know those walls would flip open so effortlessly. And I wasn’t checking you out earlier, just your ears.” It was mostly the truth.
The bunnyvoid spoke back, but Tad didn’t recognize the language, nor did the automatic translation happen, not here. Tad turned toward the girl void in the darkness. Another bellow echoed through the l
abyrinth, further away this time, but the walls reflected sound so well, it was hard to tell just how far away it was, or the direction. The minotaur bellow echoed almost endlessly. The girl put her hands along one wall and inched forward in the darkness. The light Tad had seen musn’t have come from her. Tad envisioned the floating wheel of electricity once more and cast another thunderbolt. The girl shielded her eyes from the sudden light and assumed a defensive posture.
The girl spoke more words in an unfamiliar language.
“I don’t understand you.”
The girl looked a little confused. Tad made a few hand gestures, pointing back and forth between the two, finally pointing at where the minotaur had appeared, stabbing with his dagger. He hoped he was getting his point across, of working together. Somehow, his charades seemed to get through, and after a moment of consideration, she nodded.
Tad tried to push his perception tendrils through the walls, to sense the minotaur as he had so many bosses in the past, but his senses couldn’t penetrate the black walls. And come to think of it, he hadn’t felt strength from the minotaur. Tad looked at the girl next to him, who was studying the walls for any sign of the minotaur.
He couldn’t feel her either.
His perception tendrils went through her as if she wasn’t there at all. In fact, he couldn’t feel any strength from her. Not like regular monsters, not like every slayer he had ever met. He almost didn’t believe she was there. Tad rested a hand on her shoulder and the bunnyvoid jumped back at the contact, two chipped one handed swords gleamed in the light dangerously, her eyes held an even sharper edge. The danger in her eyes looked similar to when Tad had watched her dress. His cheeks warmed at the thought. Up close, she was much prettier than Tad had remembered. Big, violet eyes, a small petite nose, and straight white teeth bared in determination. Her long black hair was a stark contrast to the white bunny ears that climbed a foot above her head.
“I can’t feel you… sense you.” Even though he knew she couldn’t understand his words, his embarrassment bubbled out, forcing him to explain.
After a moment, she lowered her swords, her eyes once again set to watching the maze walls.
It was clear to Tad, however, that his perception skill would be useless here.
He had become used to sensing friends and foes in dungeons. But it wouldn’t work here. He was blind.
After a brief, finger wiggling argument, Tad went back through the shiny door he had come from. Thunderbolt after thunderbolt illuminated their way, their breadcrumbs in the labyrinth’s darkness. Idly, Tad wondered how long those would stay illuminated, since he still hadn’t seen one extinguish yet. Sounds of battle echoed ahead, and while Tad did his best to follow them, the echoes mislead him time and time again.
Finally, he burst into a lightsphere-lit corridor where a bloody minotaur, health down below 15% stabbed his scorpion stinger repeatedly into the side of the lionvoid, they held each other hand in hand in a contest of strength, but without a scorpion stinger, the lionvoid was at a disadvantage. How had the minotaur become so damaged? Even now, the void minotaur seemed larger than it had before, faster. It had absorbed the panthervoid girl. And yet, the lionvoid had wounded it this much by himself. The lionvoid’s health had dropped to a sliver. Blood covered his pale face, but his golden eyes still shone fiercely as he held the minotaur in place.
A beam of lightning struck Tad from above, different from the one that had struck the minotaur before. This one warmed him, made him light on his feet.
*You have been granted the ‘Greased Lightning’ buff. 2x speed for 5 seconds.*
Tad wasted no time. He swept past the minotaur, casting ice vortex on the monster as he raced by. He scooped the wounded void in his arms. They had a better chance of defeating the minotaur, the three of them together.
“Neutralize poison! Heal other!”
Health ripped from Tad’s chest as the bowman’s health bar jumped to over 40%. Tad’s own had only dropped to 423, healing the man with 150 of his own health. The man’s eyes bulged in pain and panic from Tad’s healing. Two arrows appeared in a puff of black mist, but the lionvoid twisted in Tad’s arms and stabbed the twin arrows toward Tad’s chest. Tad threw the man tumbling from his arms and stumbled backward from the force of the attack. Only the tip of the arrow had pierced his skin, but it knocked him back like a gunshot wound. Surprise blossomed across the lionvoid’s fierce features, and his hands explored his sealed up wounds. Had the man mistaken Tad’s healing for an attack? Tad hadn’t tried to make it painless, in fact, it might have been more painful than most attacks. Tad scrambled backward, past the minotaur’s suddenly slow stinger, back toward where his ally stood.
The lionvoid was fast. Too fast. Even with the five second double speed bonus from the bunnyvoid, he hadn’t been quick enough to dodge the arrows completely. A sudden sinking feeling filled Tad’s gut. His healing spell should have healed the man to maximum with how much health he had slammed into him. He had expected the lionvoid to have a small health pool, since he was strong enough to hold the minotaur’s hands to a stalemate, and just as fast as Tad with a 2x speed boost. Had thought that perhaps the man had invested all his stats into strength and dexterity.
But Tad had been wrong.
The fierce, silver-maned lion of a man hadn’t put all his stats solely into dexterity and strength. If that was true, then there was only one answer for the strength disparity.
The lionvoid had earned the 2x stat aspect.
There was a second void who had done things perfectly, one who had beaten Wraithford and moved onto the next battle. Another void was ahead of Tad in progression.
Without even a grunt of thanks, the man summoned his bow from a puff of black mist and rained arrows at the minotaur. The minotaur turned to flee through the wall, but Tad was too fast. He rebounded off a far wall and flew right into the path of the fleeing boss. With all his force, he crashed into the minotaur, halting the huge monstrosity. Bolts of acid splashed across the minotaur’s backside. But worse were the arrows from the lionvoid. The wounds exploded in huge chunks of flesh, like when Raekast’s Fang had disintegrated the tongue golems. The minotaur screamed in pain and tried to shake Tad off. The scorpion tail fell over and over, but the girl void reapplied the ‘greased lightning’ buff to Tad just as it was about to end. He dodged the attacks with ease, sinking Raekast’s Fang into its chest repeatedly.
Tad couldn’t help but notice the wounds caused by his fang were smaller than those of the arrows.
The minotaur’s health dropped rapidly. Panic filled both its eyes and its actions. It wasn’t like the bosses Tad had fought before. It was clearly affected by its own hesitancy, its own fears. It wasn’t like the unimpeachable monsters with enormous strength that fought to the death without fear for their own lives.
Tad had never seen a monster like this, one that valued its own life. One that was afraid of death. There was something fiercely human in its bovine eyes, one that searched for a solution, an escape, anything to turn the tables in the eleventh hour. Its eyes reflected the feeling that Tad had felt on death’s door. Times when Tad had turned the tables.
What could it do? What did it have left?
The roar. The paralyzation roar. It had that one trick left in its bag.
The minotaur threw its head back. But Tad expected it. He leapt and looked straight down into the open throat of the void minotaur. Tad’s fifteen firebolts exploded inside the minotaur’s mouth, just before the paralyzation roar’s birth.
It hacked and coughed out flame, trying to catch its breath.
Suddenly, the minotaur disappeared completely. How had it escaped? An alert played in Tad’s head.
*Congratulations! You have defeated the void minotaur! Your max level has been increased to 100! Would you like to take part in a bonus round? You may earn missed aspects.*
Tad finally found the void minotaur. An arrow, several times larger than any Tad had ever seen, jutted from its chest, a hundred feet away. Th
e arrow pinned the minotaur to the obsidian wall behind it. The bunnyvoid was climbing to her feet, clearly knocked over from a collision with the minotaur’s soaring form. The hairs on Tad’s arms rose in danger. He hadn’t even seen the attack that had ended the life of the void minotaur, nor even seen its corpse carried away from the force of the attack.
The lionvoid was dangerous.
Tad reread the alert several times. There was a bonus round, and he could earn a missed aspect. Tad took a breath of air, it was one even a drowning man couldn’t truly appreciate. The only thing different between him and the lionvoid was the 2x stat aspect. That was the only difference that gave the man the ability to almost solo the first challenge of the warrior trial. That made him that strong.
And Tad had a second chance to catch up.
*Health:346/850
Mana:113/150*
‘Zero found a ceiling…’ The plaguebearer’s words replayed in Tad’s mind.
Tad couldn’t quit. Not yet. Not with his health and mana so high. He pressed yes.
*2 of 3 votes accepted the challenge.*
Intense music suddenly played through Tad’s head.
*Sudden Death Match! Be the last void standing to absorb the void essence of your choice!*
Tad first looked toward the bunnyvoid, his ally up to this point. Her eyes were locked on the lionvoid, filled with terror and recognition. She clearly had voted no, but had been outnumbered. Tad’s eyes next touched on the lionvoid, who already had an arrow knocked and pointed at the girl. His expression was one worthy of Zero himself. A wash of regret filled Tad.
He shouldn’t have healed him so much.