EmEs_etherious
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Chapter 116- First Round
🕑 Added 2023-11-28 23:59:00 +0000 UTCArthur was poised, ready to act. He stood on the edge of the greatest battle of his life waiting for Alyssia’s signal to come. He felt it, a small prod on the back of his head and he unleashed his magic. The shadow bomb exploded- the greatest one he’d ever created- in an entirely ordinary display of power.
It was quiet, there was no devastating boom accompanying it. A silent explosion that signified the beginning of their fight. The results were deadly. He’d detonated it using the pool of shadows at the centre of the hydra's coiling heads to deal maximum damage to all of them and he ensured it exploded with a jagged edge, the shadows acting like the shrapnel from a frag grenade.
Against most beasts, the fight would have ended there. Hydras were tanks of vitality and constitution though and the damage he dealt, deadly as it may appear, was superficial to such a massive beast. One of its seven heads reared up, roaring in outrage. Its sinuous neck was covered in deep lacerations from his opening salvo almost half a foot deep in certain places. Purple blood oozed from the wounds like drops of ink of its pale green flesh.
The cuts healed at a speed visible to the naked eye, almost as if time had been accelerated for the wounded area. In three seconds, the damage he’d dealt was gone and the creature glared at him, good as new. Its other heads still lay in a heaped pile, deep in slumber. He attributed its apparent laziness to the exhaustion pregnancy brought on the creature.
“Now,” Alyssia cried out behind him.
Arthur grinned. Shadow magic wasn’t the greatest affinity when it came to dealing damage and the hydra's immediate recovery made that readily apparent. That was why dealing damage had never been the primary purpose of his first attack. Sure, it was great and all, but any harm done was just the cherry on top.
No, the main reason why he’d started with the skill, was to magically charge the creature's shadows with his ether signature. He’d claimed them as his own. Right now, Arthur couldn’t deploy his domain because it would affect Alyssia too, but as he’d already demonstrated, he could still utilise aspects of it.
Shadow Lock
The skill cost 50 ether per second to lock a person's movement by bringing their strength into battle with his own. Against a hydra that weighed more than 10 tons trying to stop its movement with the skill was the height of stupidity. That was why he isolated the single head that had woken up, the primary brain in charge of the hydra's body and the only one that could breathe fire.
Alone, it probably weighed upwards of 500 kilograms, an intimidating weight that was nonetheless manageable for a post-system-enhanced Arthur. He felt the skill click into place and 600 ether was immediately drained out of his reservoir. The cost was massive but it fell within their expectations. He staggered and fell to his knees as the beast fought against him.
With his ether sitting at 4430, he could maintain this for another seven seconds, a short frame of time but more than long enough to suit their purposes. Enhanced as she currently was by her elixir, Alyssia had told him she could hit him 27 times in the span of a second, with 19 of them being enough to deal over 15,000 points of damage and take his life. Her abilities worked exponentially, with every consecutive attack she managed to land without any delay dealing significantly more damage.
Against a human-sized target like Arthur, she could strike 27 times a second, which she predicted would cause 40,000 points of damage. With a target as big as the hydra, that number shot up. In two seconds she could deal well over 100,000 points of damage. In three, over a million. That was more than enough to kill a lesser hydra and she had just been given seven seconds to work with. As exhausted as the poor creature was, currently the other heads would take at least five seconds to wake up.
More than enough time to get the job done. The only thing he was worried about was if Alyssia’s stamina and ether reserves would hold up. Her skills were as expensive as they were effective.
When Alyssia attacked, he saw nothing. Heard nothing, not even a sonic boom. To his senses, she didn’t even exist at all. The woman he’d come to call his close acquaintance, probationary-friend moved faster than she ever had before, faster than the storm walkers of the first layer could ever dream of, the concept of speed made manifest in physical reality.
The functions of her body worked overtime to keep up with her energy expenditure, her heart racing a mile a minute, lungs buzzing like the wings of a bee as they respirated at a rate that managed to noticeably decrease the oxygen content in a twenty-metre radius, one of the numerous spells she’d cast being used to gather the gas from further and further away.
In the span of a second, it felt like Arthur had been transported to the peak of a mountain, his next breath an uncomfortable but manageable experience in the thinner air. The massive hydra suffered far more. At the heights of power, some could subsist without requiring oxygen. The beast was still far from that point though, and its huge body meant it needed an oxygen-rich environment to live comfortably.
In the first second of his shadow lock, nothing happened, in the second, the hydra's green flesh was painted purple with its blood, its flesh spasming as electrical currants ran through it. Certain parts of its body disintegrated at a speed visible to the naked eye as if someone was editing the creature out of existence.
Arthur's ears popped as if he was on a plane that had just touched down. He didn’t know the science of it and attributed it to whatever magic Alyssia currently had at play. He kept his eyes peeled on the dying monster not wanting to miss any final attacks the creature might try to throw. It wasn’t every day you got to see an apocalypse beast completely overwhelmed like this.
The cost of his shadow lock skill suddenly spiked up to 12 hundred points, the third second of the skill costing as much as the first two combined. The damn hydra was trying to set itself on fire. It had managed to open its mouth partially, its throat muscles prepared to breathe its liquid flame onto its own body. Arthur managed to halt the motion in time.
Had the creature managed to get the skill off, Alyssia would have been forced to stop her assault and risk losing all the progress she’d already made. Thankfully, things had worked out for once and he felt the tension drain from him. This was the hardest part of the fight, and it looked like they would be successful.
Nothing else went wrong, and four seconds into the fight, the lesser hydra was vanquished. It took a little longer than they’d predicted but that was expected. A real fight had too many variables to accurately plan for every eventuality and a single second extra was hardly the worst that could happen.
To his eyes, it looked like the hydra was there one second and then gone the next. All that remained of it was charred chunks of flesh and bits of splintered bone that had survived Alyssia’s devastating attack. Arthur let his shadow lock go and checked his ether reserves. 2709/5555 He had a little less than half left in the tank. Hopefully, it would be enough for what was coming.
Alyssia appeared next to him, finally standing still or at least trying to. She staggered forward, falling to her knees and vomited onto the muddy ground. Her skin was so pale she appeared bloodless, and she was covered in about two litres of sweat, the liquid steaming off her as it tried and failed to cool her overheated body.
She tried to speak but failed, coughing phlegm and spittle all over herself and it was only then that Arthur noticed that the skin on her fists and arms had quite literally been burned off, with the rest of her body suffering the same fate in varying degrees. She’s not pale cos she's feeling nauseous or anything. She burned off a layer of fucking skin and it's healed.
Arthur knew the look quite well. He’d worked in the hospital treating injuries for almost an entire week. Magically healed skin always appeared paler than normal. But the burns on her hands weren’t healing. It took a moment for him to realise what had happened before he rushed forward to help her. He’d stored enough healing in her to completely recover her health pool at least once. Except Alyssia wasn’t healing.
How many bones had she broken in those four seconds? How many muscles had she torn? Her skin had burned and ripped and then healed for the duration of that short fight in a vicious cycle until now that energy pool of healing had bottomed out. He placed his hands on her arm and used Regeneration on her. She tried to push him away but Arthur didn’t budge. Her wounds took a mere four seconds to heal, the superficial ones at least. Internally, however, she had a lot more damage. Her calf muscles were torn to shreds, her left Achilles heel on the verge of snapping. She’d dislocated her shoulder and micro-fractures ran down the length of her shin-bone. Alyssia’s constitution truly was too low to keep up with her agility.
Hopefully, as she evolved the Greaves of Achilles and grew stronger herself, she’d be able to counteract the issue better. All in all, despite the extensive damage, Arthur was done in under a minute. Alyysia’s vitality was so low that healing her cost almost nothing. After he was done, he used the skills' secondary effect and topped off her reserves of healing.
“You- shouldn’t…have done that,” she gasped out, breathless.
His healing, as great as it was, could do nothing for stamina.
“But I did and it's done,” Arthur replied. “Don’t waste your energy arguing about it.”
She looked like she was going to protest before realising now wasn’t the best time.
“Thank you, then,” she said. “Even if I think you should’ve saved your energy. My ethers bottomed out completely and will take twenty minutes before I’m ready to do anything again, enhanced as my regeneration is right now.”
“So how much health did the hydra have? The fight took four seconds. You said you could do a million damage in three?”
Alyssia shook her head. “I didn’t consider how- taxing it would be on my body honestly,” she chuckled. “I really should’ve seen that coming. The hydra had 1,001,000 health. Damn locus should’ve just made it an even million.” She smiled. “I got a title out of it though and it's tier 3.”
Her eyes got a weird blank look, the tell-tale sign that someone was reading a system notification. “It's called Giant's bane. Requirements, deal over a million damage in under 5 seconds whilst below level 200. How about that? Guess I can’t complain about the locus not using even numbers now. It lets me ignore 5% of my target's defence.”
She laughed. “You know what that means. Armour, scales, magic barriers, constitution. Any other stat there might be for defences? I get to ignore 5% of it. This is probably better than whatever the reward for this layer is.”
Arthur smiled, though he couldn’t help but feel a little envious. She deserved it though. Earning that title was nigh impossible for someone under level 200. For starters, monsters just didn’t have that much health, besides exceptions like hydras and fighting a real one instead of the weak imitation they were facing was suicide. A normal person would probably have to fight multiple enemies at once and hope they would collectively have a million health to achieve anything similar.
Finding the right monsters was a difficult task in itself, but actually dealing so much damage in such a small time frame. Well, that was impossible. Arthur was honestly surprised it wasn’t a tier 4 title. Perhaps if she’d done it below level 150? Alyssia brought him out of his inner musings with a question. “So, are you ready to do your part then?” She asked, with a wide grin on her face. Arthur sighed. He’d get to fulfill his job as a tank. There was a reason why he’d had to get naked for this fight.
“Alright. I’ll leave you to it. Try not to get castrated.” Alyssia chuckled as she began to walk away. She moved slowly even if she was fully healed, the memory of the pain dragging her still. He shook his head in amusement, a wry smile on his face. Hopefully, he didn’t get his balls burned off. Turning to the remnants of the hydra's corpse, he saw that they had disappeared. In their place, floated an orb of pulsating purple the size of a beach ball. Well, calling it a corpse hadn’t exactly been right. After all, they’d yet to receive any levels from killing the beast, nor had they located the monster's core.
In mythology, hydras grew two heads when you cut one off. Sadly, in reality, that wasn’t the case, at least the two heads part. They’d grow one back if you gave them a few minutes. No, in the real world, hydras were far more annoying.
They had multiple lives.
At the peak of their potential, they were said to have nine lives, with each revival bringing them back to full strength with all their energy reserves replenished and their skill cooldowns brought down to zero. To kill one of them, you had to kill the apocalypse beast nine times in ten hours, before they had a chance to regenerate one of their ‘spent’ lives. There was a reason why hydras were called unkillable.
Thankfully the specimen they were fighting was far weaker, barely into its adolescent phase despite its apparent ‘pregnancy.’ The locus didn’t have to follow the rules of biology. Alyssia had analysed their enemies' aura thoroughly. The lesser hydra only had three lives. They’d already ended one. The job was ninety percent done. Its second life would only bring it back to 30% of its full power. They had 24 hours before it gained its extra life back and seven days before it regained its full strength.
Arthur's job was simple. He had to keep the monster occupied, tank its attacks and keep it from chasing Alyssia until she’d regenerated her ether enough to come and finish this one off. Its first death meant it was now childless and would no longer concern itself with conserving energy by standing still.
A creature with 300,000 health. He was supposed to wait for Alyssia but
Arthur was feeling impatient.
Next Chapter- Friday
