Path of the Slayer B3 49. Slayer Targeting & First Objective

Doomie stepped out of me with a simple swing of her leg followed by the other. For the first time I’d ever met her, the doom avatar didn’t watch me obsessively. Her shaded eyes glanced around our location as she fanned her dragon wings from behind her back.

She was still small relative to most humanoids, standing only five-foot-three, but the weight of her was immense. Her presence visibly warped reality around the outline of her dark and doom-filled body like a tidal whirlpool.

With a quick scan around me, I confirmed her crushing power wasn’t being used to harm my squad. She was holding it back for their sake.

Better yet, my Veteran Rex didn’t lose his sense of mind while Doomie was out. That was a good sign of how much Doomie had improved her control and awareness. That and V was more focused on the fight to come instead of getting bothered by the presence of a dragon-like entity.

I smiled as the doom avatar turned to look up at me.

“Can you help me reload?” I asked her.

Doomie nodded.

“Good girl.”

Doomie nodded again with more fervor. She seemed to act positively to my affection.

The Stormcannon Dominator Armor was enhancing Doomie’s flexibility, and that came in the form of Doomie digging into my pouches and neatly placing down three-foot rail bolts in a pile near the base plate. Once she’d pulled out all of them, she grabbed the charging handle and slid it back with one hand. Chamber open, she inserted the first rail bolt before closing the chamber, locking the rail bolt into place.

“I could’ve helped with that, master,” Grimmy offered, sounding jealous.

“Your job is to look cool and be ready to face enemy Veterans or a horde of monsters,” I told her.

“Okay!” The sunny light from her Oath shone brighter as she stood at attention, her greatsword resting blade down in front of her, her steel-clad hands on the guard.

Doomie’s attention stuck to Grimmy for a few seconds before she turned to look at me. She opened her mouth to release a silent moan, and a wave of doom struck me.

With my soul empowered by Slayer Feast, my spirit shrugged off the heavy consequence of having something like Doomie. The warmth I held in my voice remained the same.

“We’re going to hit hard and fast. As soon as I fire, I need you to reload the Mag Storm Cannon again. Can you do that for me, Doomie?”

The doom avatar nodded.

“Good girl.”

She nodded at that as well. If I looked closely, the very simple outline forming her mouth was curved up a smidge. Yeah, she definitely enjoyed being acknowledged.

“Seriously, how are you going to hit from this far out?!” Merlin asked from fifty feet away.

The answer to that was easy. “With the one power I have that nobody else does. My Path.”

If stripped of everything, to have a Path was a power in itself. With its variable uses, Path Energy was the next basic thing that made a Pathwalker who they were. With Slayer Intent and Slayer Feast added to the mix, my Path of the Slayer was as supercharged as it could currently get.

My eyesight wasn’t needed, so I closed my eyes.

My hearing wasn’t needed, so I tuned out every sound.

My sense of smell. My touch. Even taste. I tuned down all the physical senses.

Once I dulled all five, my sixth sense became the most prominent, my sense for my Path, and my sense for what I wanted to achieve most as the Slayer. It was clear and true. It was deadly in its intent. It was hungry for the death and destruction of my enemies.

But there was more than just that. There was the Royal Quest. There was Doomie. And through those two mystical weights placed upon my inner existence, I felt a connection to something else. It was through my Doom Brand – the Dragon Princess.

I wasn’t sure if she knew the truth about me or not. But her certainty, her deadliness, her power, all of that was expressed with her influence upon me, and that only made the Slayer in me stronger, hungrier, and sharper.

Here, against our shared enemies, the Slayer and the Dragon Princess became aligned, and my Path loved it.

By the time I charged myself up with a thunderstorm of electromagnetism, I knew my aim was as true as could be. Then I released the charge through my finger and into the enchanted trigger.

Coils of magnetic lightning ran up and down the two rails on the left and the right. The aluminum armature encasing the bolt turned into plasma before the magnetic fields on the left and the right pushed the plasma-wrapped bolt forward.

With a thunderous roar that lit up the plateau and miles of land in front of me, I sliced a wound through reality with a gravity-enhanced and hell-cursed bolt moving at Mach 7.

In 0.005 seconds, the bolt struck the barrier surrounding the long needle thirty miles away. A staticky blue and black light flashed from around the Embassy of Defilement before snapping with a purple glare.

Before the barrier fully fell, Doomie had already reloaded the Mag Storm Cannon in 0.05 seconds, smoothly slipping another bolt and locking it into place before the gases inside the chamber fully cleared. It took me longer to recharge, but not too long, not with all the powers at my disposal, as hellish banshees screamed and circled about while Slaughter laughed and laughed from behind me.

Then at the 0.25 second mark, I hit peak charge a second time and released it into the Mag Storm Cannon again. The world became thunder and violence once more. The platform sunk heavier into the plateau rock, with Sabretooth growling as she leaned into my back and helped absorb the immense recoil.

The thunderous noise was still roaring and echoing all around us as furious purple light and dark eruptions flashed from the needle-like embassy miles across the shooting range. My second shot landed true, but the needle remained upright. That was fine with me. I had plenty more to send downrange, and Doomie’s reloading speed was without reproach as we worked together at a cyclic rate.

Eventually, the inevitable happened, stopping me while we still had five more bolts remaining.

The Embassy of Defilement fell.

A deluge of huge notifications hit my System Logs. I imagined the same was appearing in the other squad members.

[Congratulations, Pathwalkers! You’ve caused over 60% destructive damage to the Embassy of Defilement! Bravo!]

[Congrats! For bringing destruction to the Embassy of Defilement, you’ve earned Two Trillion Credits in your Realm Verse Bank Account!]

[At this point, the Royal Quest is considered satisfied. However, if you wish to achieve the other objectives, please continue offensive actions against the Defiled Covenant at the Crossroads Citadel Realm. Two other objectives remain: [1] Killing 80 Pathwalkers (above Level 61) on Path of the Defiled Covenant. [2] Killing 4 Veterans of the Defiled Covenant.]

[Achieve another objective, and you’ll double your Basic Reward. Achieve all three objectives, and you’ll quadruple your Basic Reward and receive a Super Reward: A Dragon Princess Favor.]

“Is there anyone who wants off this ride?” I asked aloud.

“SCREW YOU! We’re already committed! I say let’s keep going!” Merlin shouted, placing his helmet back on his head.

“Don’t you dare cut me off from a good time,” V grumbled. “I just got here.”

“Honestly, it would be wise for us to step back,” Veteran Zez said. “But … I must admit. I’m feeling rather greedy. And it wouldn’t be a terrible use of my time to follow my wife into battle and support her.”

“You just want to see me get all hot and bloody, don’t you, my handsome little man?” Veteran Sharia laughed. “Well … I wouldn’t mind putting on a show for you, anyway.”

“I haven’t gotten to use my sword and look badass!” Grimmy grouched.

It was good to see that the most powerful fighters here wanted to keep going. But I looked back to check on my juniors as well, and based on how they stood ready for more action, I safely assumed the offensive would continue.

Great!

I didn’t want to leave early. Completing one objective on the Royal Quest wasn’t good enough. We had to go three-for-three, and thankfully, the Defiled Covenant was more than incentivized to come to us instead of making us go to them.

“Here they are,” I said, shifting my position slightly as something fast and immense came flying at us.

I barely needed to aim before releasing my charge and letting loose another thunderous, gravity-enhanced and hellish bolt. The serpent-like thing was too slow to fly out of the way and had its entire body reduced to steaming hot gore that scattered far across the putrid forests, ravines, and lakes.

[You’ve slain a Rank 5 defiled sky serpent!]

“V! Merlin! The Rank 5 monsters are incoming! And I’m down to …”

I trailed off, watching Doomie reload the Mag Storm Cannon before I released another charge. I briefly read the latest notification – [You’ve slain a Rank 5 defiled storm bird!] – then I continued with what I was saying.

“I’m down to three bolts!”

They didn’t last long.

[You’ve slain a Rank 5 defiled pegasus!]

[You’ve slain a Rank 5 defiled wyvern!]

[You’ve slain a Rank 5 defiled cloud whale!]

Doomie stopped the moment the last bolt went downrange and ripped a blubbery behemoth apart. Its death rained upon the corrupted forests, lakes, and hillocks like a heavy cloudburst of chunks and viscera.

With that, my strongest weapon was out of the game, and we still hadn’t faced a Pathwalker of the Defiled Covenant yet.

At the very least, I cleared the sky of defiled Rank 5 monsters that could fly. But there were more defiled monsters that were moving at a stampede across the land quickly, crossing miles with ease.

We didn’t even have minutes before they would reach the base of the plateau and make their climb up.

Fortunately, Wolfie and the Shadow Clones had done the thing I wanted. As I broke down my railcannon station, I watched as the Rank 5 Infernal Capacity Explosives brought more hell and thunder to the defilers from miles in front of the plateau.

Massive monsters, three hundred to five hundred feet tall, lost their legs and came crashing down. Smaller monsters ended up blown apart or crushed under the bigger monsters that fell upon them.

My System Logs became filled with slain notifications, but not as many as I would hope.

Unlike Rankers, Rank 5 monsters were far tougher, far more monstrous. Their Vitality, even with defilement, kept them moving. Their Aether-filled magic came to the forefront as even the monsters who lost their legs took their shots at our position.

A blue telekinetic magic shield came up before a corrosive bile shot landed all over me, Grimmy, and sixty feet of plateau around us. The bile shot couldn’t break through, splattering down to the ground far below.

“Oh, wait, is it my turn to show off? Is it really my moment now?” Merlin asked, walking up to me after I scrubbed the area clean of hellish runes.

“My Wizard Until Death, right?” I asked in jest.

Merlin nodded. “Damn straight.”