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Chapter 118: The Sabatuer Supreme
🕑 Added 2023-10-26 17:25:21 +0000 UTCMatt’s Stored Strike only worked if his body was completely motionless, but he had no way of knowing if that meant in terms of him actively moving, or moving relative to other objects. He hoped it would be the former, so he still might be able to store some energy before the big impact. He pulled his shovel back as far as he could, then stopped moving as he fell.
“Matt!” Lucy was scrambling for anything that might help. “You are only moving in some senses of the word!”
It was hot nonsense, but, god bless her, Lucy’s words helped Matt realize that his plan might actually work. He felt the tension building in his muscles as he fell, and all that was left was to time the hit.
Matt honestly would have been happy if his attack just deflected the rhino’s punch. He would have been overjoyed if it had kicked the rhino off-balance a little, too. But when the non-sharp edge of the shovel caught the rhino’s fist, there was apparently just enough stored force to spin the heavy set enemy entirely around. It didn’t shatter bones, but it was beyond Matt’s wildest hopes already.
As Matt hit the ground, he poured the absolute maximum amount of stamina he could into Spring Fighter. He had done the same to get into the warehouse earlier, but that was over a long distance. Here, he applied the same amount to just one motion, which was looping his shovel around the rhino’s neck. Since he planned to turn off the motion before any impact was made and didn’t intend to make a strike, the skill seemed to regard the speed as pure combat maneuvering and let it slide.
Before the rhino could recover and face Matt again, Matt clamped the pole of the shovel down over his windpipe and heaved backwards as hard as he could. It worked a little too well. Still off balance, the rhino fell, landing on top of Matt. Weathering the weight of the rhino’s body, Matt tried his best to not pass out and keep his enemy in a chokehold.
The rhino itself was huge, but most of that bulk was the torso. Its actual legs were stumpy, and in the position it found itself, it couldn’t get leverage on the ground with them. It desperately tried to throw elbows at Matt and roll around, but the shovel-turned-noose around its neck meant that Matt had a disproportionate amount of control over where it went. He was getting bruised, scraped and fractured as the rhino’s struggling ground him into the stone floor, but it was nothing he couldn’t handle.
After almost a minute, the rhino succumbed to the chokehold, or seemed to. Matt wasn’t taking any chances. He held the position for a full additional minute before taking his chances on getting up. To the rhino’s credit, it was honest about passing out. To its body’s credit, its neck was thick enough that it took three or four chops to fully detach the head.
Matt half-expected enemies to come barreling through the door at any moment during the fight, but none did. Apparently the closed-box design of the room was enough to muffle the sounds of the fight, or else he’d be up to his ears in guards by now. Still, the fact that at some point the relief for the interior guard who had left would be on their way meant there wasn’t any time to waste.
Matt quickly took his coin purse back from the rhino, but otherwise didn’t stop to loot. He then ran to the fence, vaulted it a bit more carefully, and, holding his shovel by the very end of the handle, gingerly poked the heart. The force field did nothing to stop the shovel. It was like it wasn’t there.
Matt had intended to test how durable the heart. The next step of his plan was to temporarily sacrifice his soul-bound shovel to the task of being thrown at a giant, cursed organ like a javelin. But when the point made contact with the heart, his expectations were shattered. The moment the shovel touched, the heart recoiled inwards as if beating, then puffed outwards. Matt watched as the force field suddenly shattered, just before a notification sounded in his ears.
Ding!
Mana Drain Condition Detected
The Demon Lord’s Heart of Destructive Bane has begun to overload itself with mana in preparation for its eventual detonation. As a result, you are losing small but significant amounts of mana the longer you stay in its direct vicinity.
“Oh, shit.” Matt was immediately up and over the wall.
“What, what? You didn’t even destroy it, Matt.”
“No time. That thing is a bomb, Lucy. And I set it off.”
“Are you sure?”
“I got a notification. It’s a big giant heart that’s drawing in mana in preparation to explode. It’s named after the demon lord. I’m not sticking around.”
Lucy looked back at the clearly cursed gigantic heart, then nodded. There were a lot of things they’d take chances on, but giant explosions weren’t one they had consistent luck with, and they didn’t have an entire Nullsteel building to increase their odds this time.
Matt ditched stealth entirely, leaping up and running on the tops of the crates and shelves as he rushed to the door. About halfway there, the heart made an audible thoomp sound as it beat a single time. A wave of destructive energy flew out in a halo from it, crashing against walls and decimating shelves. Matt flared Spring Fighter as he used the shovel to push himself off from the ceiling, landed in front of the door, and burst through it just ahead of the wave.
As he crossed the threshold, the building was shaking from the burst of energy. Even so, it wasn’t enough to distract the guards from the sudden appearance of a human from their closely-guarded treasure vault. Matt skidded past them, dodged two spear strikes, then cut away from the door at a 90-degree angle just as a section of the heart’s energy cut unimpeded through the door and vaporized two of the guards.
Matt was off. His bribing of the front-gate guards was meaningless now. He’d have to go over the wall, but more than that, his main focus for now was just keeping the maximum number of buildings between him and the pulses of the heart. In the distance, he heard a loud crashing he assumed was the walls of the military depot, followed by another thoomp of terror. At a full sprint and with no obstructions in his way, he was still ahead of the danger, but it was closing fast. Behind him, he heard the crashing of hundreds of shoddily built demon-hut-spikes crashing to the ground.
As he passed, various demons were startled at the sight of a fleeing human before, seconds later, became consumed by magical shockwaves, covered by debris from the destruction of fragile buildings, or both. In sheer panic, he was pushing as fast as he possibly could, his legs pumping wildly and his lungs burning for the first time in a long time. But he was moving fast, fast enough that within no more than several seconds he was near the short rock wall surrounding the town.
He glanced back. It was a mistake. The force was a few yards behind him, at best. Startled by the surprise of being moments from death, he stumbled. He barely avoided being consumed by the persistence of his own momentum. An unsteady stride later, he caught a foot solidly under him and did the only thing he could do. He leapt.
He had no idea how the pulse worked, exactly, or if jumping would even help him. But his panicked leap, supplemented by the meager amount of stamina he had left, was enough for him to get both over the wall and onto the plane it protected. Stooping his head as far as he could, he kept running, Apparently the heart hadn’t stopped beating. One shockwave after another flew inches over his head. He had no idea how sturdy the wall around the town was, but he couldn't count on it to hold forever. He kept running.
Then, suddenly, the pulses stopped. After a few seconds of quiet, Matt looked back over his shoulder at the town. Or what was left of it. In the absence of the pulses, it was mostly leveled, with only a few stone buildings still standing here and there. Most of the dust had been pushed out and up by the pulses of magical power, and hung in the air over it like smog.
Matt kept running. Even if the heart was done, that didn’t mean people couldn’t see what was happening. He was alone in an enemy wasteland, and had just confirmed there were demons that could more than hold their own against him. He got off the path, running towards some distant hills that he hoped would give him some visual cover.
And then, suddenly, the heart finally activated. A second ago, Matt would have said that the pulsing was plenty, that this was clearly what the heart did and why it needed to be destroyed. But now, with a magical dome of green fire appearing over the entire town and about a quarter-mile of land outside it, he realized those pulses were just some kind of priming mechanism, something to keep enemies away from the heart while preparing the air around it for something like magical conductivity.
It was like an inferno trapped inside a snow-globe, as the explosion lit up the area like a camera flash for just a few seconds. Then, the light and the fire both winked out at once, as if it had never been there. Behind him, where the town once stood, was nothing. No houses, no demons, no depot, and no heart. There were just a few scattered stones and a large, perfectly circular scorch mark indicating where a demon settlement had once stood.
“Oh, holy shit, Matt. Holy shit. Why do they even have that? Do you think that’s why everything is red?”
“No, I don’t. There’s no way they set those off in their home territory. It’s basically a magical nuke. And it didn’t even turn stuff red.”
“All I know is if we get to any more demon towns, and it seems like there’s more of those, we are clearing out.”
Ding!
Sabatuer Supreme
Already deep in enemy territory, you delved even deeper. Alone and nearly defenseless, you cut to the very heart of the secrets contained within a demon stronghold. Then you blew them all up. The secrets. The demons. All their houses. Literally hundreds of drinking mugs. Everything.
I’m going to be honest, when you first showed up, I didn’t expect a whole lot. Just one guy? Not a big deal. But you just became the sole survivor of the second or third most powerful explosion this planet even has seen, without a scratch, while sending hundreds of demons to meet a maker they don’t even have in the wash.
Pretty good work.
Rewards: Subtle Cloak, 500 Class XP, 10 DEX, 10 PER, 10 STR
Subtle Cloak
At a constant, small drain to either mana (for mana utilizing classes) or a penalty to maximum stamina (for physical classes), the subtle cloak makes almost everything you do just a little less noticeable. If someone is looking for you, they will have a little harder of a time finding you. If you are doing something suspicious, it will be a little less likely that any given person will notice. And if you are sneaking, your footfalls will sound just a bit more like natural sounds.
These effects are small, but consistent across any kind of senses. And, fair warning, this enchantment does not differentiate between friend and foe. It works on people you might want to find you, as well.
“That’s a pretty solid reward,” Lucy said after Matt described his haul. “Honestly, I think our system instance was holding out on us, Matt.”
“Well, to be fair, we did just nuke an enemy town, as far as this system is concerned. It probably deserves that. But yeah, I’m not complaining.”
Comments
Jake Holland
Nobody expects the Matt!
Lyncher98
Honestly thought he was going to take a bite out of the heart and get a super meta trait
