Chapter 128

The inquisitor staggered to one side at the same time as Luke, leaving both of them vulnerable. But Luke had more stamina, and [Life Surge] was still pumping him up. He recovered before the inquisitor did, and he used that window of opportunity to turn his stagger into a heavy, planted step, pivoted on that foot, charged [Power Strike] down through his arms, and brought his mace around in a wide-arcing two-handed swing that delivered all of that force directly into the inquisitor’s rib cage.

Luke had been aiming for the inquisitor’s face, but even caught off guard and momentarily stunned, he still recovered so fast that Luke missed shattering his skull into a thousand pieces. It was still a death blow to any normal person, strong enough to pick the inquisitor up off the ground and throw him over the roof. Wooden shingles went flying as he crashed through a house on the other side of the street a block over.

Luke heard the body thump against the floor inside the house, and he waited, desperately hoping he’d hear the notification ding. When it didn’t come after a few seconds, he silently cursed the man’s durability.

“Not dead?” Zea asked, seeing the look on his face.

Luke shook his head. “Should we run?”

“He’s injured. We might not get a better shot at taking him out.”

“He’s got reinforcements coming. I can hear mercs shouting a few blocks over.”

“Shit. How many?”

“I don’t know,” Luke said. “At least five.”

“Can you finish him off before they get here?”

Luke heard the inquisitor groan, and the sound of a piece of wood scraping against the floor. There was a rattle of many small things hitting the ground, and the inquisitor climbing back to his feet.

“Nope! Time to go. He’s back up again.”

Luke snatched up a loose pack from the ground, grabbed Zea, tucked her under one arm, and started running. “Hey!” she said, “What the fuck, man!”

Her words came out individually as she bounced with each step. “No time,” Luke said harshly. He tossed her up and forward, then sped up slightly to get underneath her so she landed on his back. He didn’t quite get the bag out of the way in time, and it got squished between them while she scrambled to hang on.

Once she had secured herself with an arm around his neck, Luke put on the speed. He bounded through the city, leaping over knots of people when they were packed too densely to go around. “Fuuuuuuccckkk,” Zea screamed when he leaped a house at the end of a dead-end street.

They broke free of the city a minute later, with Luke laughing wildly while Zea tried not to scream again. “Brings back memories,” he hollered over the wind. “Just like being chased out of Valtira.”

“I haaatte you!” Zea yelled back.

Luke just kept laughing as he sprinted across open fields. At the speed they were going, he doubted there’d be any pursuit capable of keeping up with him, but raw stats weren’t everything. It wouldn’t surprise him at all if that inquisitor pulled some trick out of his ass that let him move faster. Every thousand feet or so, he’d spin in place, much to Zea’s misery, and confirm that there was no one behind him in that ever-shrinking gap where his peripheral vision couldn’t see.

About twenty minutes and just as many miles later, he slowed down. The forest loomed up in front of him, and while he thought he could probably dodge between the trees at full speed, he didn’t want to take the chance of accidentally hurting Zea. Plus, the chokehold she had on his neck was making it harder to breathe.

He ghosted through the trees and came to a stop a few hundred feet in. Slowly, Zea pried her fingers off of Luke and dropped to the ground, where her legs wobbled for a moment before she gained her balance. “Well, let’s not ever fucking do that again, shall we?” she said.

The adrenaline was starting to wear off now, and while Luke wasn’t exactly tired, he was feeling a little twitchy. “That guy was the scariest thing I’ve ever seen,” he said. “You don’t even… he could have killed you with one hit, and he knew it. He was using it too.”

He didn’t want to make Zea feel bad, but she’d made that fight harder just by being there. On the other hand, whatever she’d made with [Ghost Script] had been what he’d needed to finally land a single decisive blow against the inquisitor. Even that hadn’t been strong enough to finish the man off, sadly. Maybe if Luke had blown the rest of his AP, he could have overpowered the inquisitor, but he doubted it.

If he wanted to win the rematch, he needed to learn harder into his bloodline skills, which meant finding a safe place to hole up and doing the ritual as soon as possible. As much as he wanted a fix for XP Madness, he’d take the skill that let him fuck with other people’s stats first. It was probably the only way he was going to win if that inquisitor caught up to them again short of bombing another anthill.

“We need to find a safe place and do the ritual as soon as possible. Next time that fucker comes near us, I want to be able to drop his agility down to zero. Then I’ll beat the hell out of him for a while before I take away his stamina too.”

“Maybe we could just avoid him in the future,” Zea suggested. “Or at least try.”

“Seems unrealistic,” Luke said. “Hard to avoid someone like that when he’s looking for you.”

“Probably right,” she said. “Okay, so… caves are probably going to be harder to find this far from the mountains. Any thoughts on where you want to do this ritual?”

“Uh… that’s a good question.”

* * *

They ended up finding a wide, flat shelf of stone that overlooked a stream. It was relatively clear of typical forest debris, and what little there was cleaned up easily. Zea had handled that while Luke had fetched some fire wood. He’d been given directions to bring back enough to last a fire all night, and when he’d dropped the first load off, she’d told him to find two more just as big.

That was more than an overnight pile of wood, in his opinion, but he wasn’t the one with [Bloodline Purification Ritual], so he just did as he was told. Meanwhile, she’d scoured the stone and started drawing complicated geometric patterns on it. Luke noticed that this one was a lot bigger than the first one, with quite a few empty spaces in it. She paused regularly to stack firewood in those spots, and he was starting to see a pattern to it.

Unfortunately, that pattern was a circle with a suspiciously empty Luke-sized hole in the center. “Uh, this isn’t one of those rituals that has words like ‘burn the witch’ in it, right?” he said.

“Don’t distract me, this is harder than it looks, even with the upgrades to my skills.”

“Oh yeah. I forgot you were going to do that. [Cadence], [Mana Sight], and [Mana Manipulation], right?”

“90 fucking AP for them,” she said absently. “Better be worth it.”

She traced another shape in the stone with the chalk, then frowned and compared it to the other side of the ritual circle. With an annoyed sigh, she splashed some water from her waterskin on it, let it dry, and redrew it. “There’s an herb in my bag you’ll need to eat. It’s a dusky red color with blue veins running through it. Get that out, please.”

“This?” Luke said, holding up what looked to him like a simple leaf rolled up on itself and stored in a glass jar.

“That’s the one. I’m told it tastes like chewing on fire, but it also cost us seven gold, so don’t waste it.”

“Eh?” Luke eyed the leaf. Then he shrugged. With his stamina up into the sixties now, he wasn’t too worried about eating Aros’s version of the Carolina reaper. Now, the amount of fire wood that was getting piled up in this ritual circle, that was concerning. He didn’t know exactly how his regeneration would interact with being burned alive, but he doubted it would be a fun experience.

While he waited for Zea to finish setting up, he got into their food pack and started eating the snacks. Just because [Life Surge]didn’t drop him on his ass now that it was at rank 2 didn’t mean he didn’t need to replenish that energy anyway. Plus, if this ritual was anything like the last one, he’d be using it again at the end of it.

Eventually, everything was set up. Luke stood in the center of the circle, naked for some reason, and surrounded by a ring of firewood. Outside that was the familiar set up from before, with smaller circles inscribed inside the whole. Each of those had something in it, though this time there seemed to be a definite theme going on. A red gemstone glinted in the evening light to his left, and some sort of yellow-banded stick sat opposite it. A ruddy brownish-red scorpion, dead, thankfully, took center stage in front of him.

“Okay, this next part is going to take about ten minutes to get going. When I light the wood on fire, that’s your cue to eat that herb. You’re going to start sweating, and it’s going to be mostly blood. Don’t freak out if it’s not the normal color, or if it starts to hurt. Just don’t move out of the circle, and don’t use any skills until I tell you.”

“Got it.”

Zea took a deep breath and said, “Alright. Here we go.”

* * *

Lath grimaced in pain as he landed back on the ground. The jump hadn’t seemed that high from his perch in the tree, but then again, he didn’t usually demonstrate that kind of athletics with four busted ribs. Much as he hated to admit it, that apostate had gotten a solid hit on him. It had been over three hours and things still weren’t fully healed up.

Between that explosive trap at the beginning of the fight and the apostate’s final attack at the end, Lath hadn’t been this injured in a decade. Though they were both undoubtably a higher level than they’d been when his apprentice had lost her life to them, he was still begrudgingly impressed with their capabilities.

That didn’t mean he wasn’t going to kill them as soon as he caught up to them, of course. He’d paused just long enough to fetch a new set of poisons from his rooms, then raced back across the city to chase the apostates in their flight from him. It had been relatively slow going, at least by his normal pace. Between his injuries, his lack of familiarity with the local terrain, and the fact that his skill set really wasn’t geared towards tracking, it had been a troublesome expedition out into the wilderness.

This was precisely why he’d hired those worthless mercenaries to find the apostates in the first place. It was too bad they’d been unable to execute the simplest of tasks without getting themselves slaughtered. He had the two almost-competent ones with him, and they assured him that they were making good time, that they’d catch up when the targets stopped to sleep.

Lath didn’t bother correcting them. If the apostates were smart, they wouldn’t stop running for days. It was going to be a long, drawn-out trip. At least it would give him time to fully recover before the next confrontation. When he did finally catch up to them, he was going to kill the dwifkin first, just so she couldn’t reveal any more surprises.

Much as he wanted to take his time and avenge his fallen apprentice, the apostates had proven too dangerous to subdue. Attempting that had been Myla’s own error in judgment. Lath was just going to stab a poisoned knife into the apostate’s heart and end it.