Chapter 661 - The abyss takes thee

After a minute of evading the god’s tentacles the effect of the storm pendant started to falter, allowing the storm clouds to close in a bit before Sofia summoned another flask of blood to reactivate it.

The tentacle attacks kept coming. Now confident she could evade them with relative ease, Sofia started charging a piercing angel bolt, and whacked the tentacles with it whenever she found an opportunity. The lance of hot plasma only ever grazed the tentacles, carving shallow burned gashes in the amalgam of rotten fises and sea creatures. Still, it was enough, Sofia’s blood slowly charged up with lightning with every strike.

After less than a minute of this chaotic aerial dance, the tentacles sunk back down again, and even the lightning strikes in the surrounding storm seemed to slowly weaken.

Already done?

The ocean boiled, and from its depths rose a gargantuan hand. It was made of the same grotesque amalgam as the tentacles, dead sea life mashed into a massive hand. Almost as large as the storm’s clearing, and coming straight for her.

Sofia was not fast enough to evade it, when she realized what was happening, the hand’s rotting fingers were already closing around her. Not about to let herself get crushed to death, Sofia fell down onto the hand’s palm.

She placed her own hand on top of the pile of rotting fish, and opened a wide hole in the god’s hand. She had used [Bone dominus] to carve herself a path, using the bones of all the corpses making up the God’s body. They were not truly the god’s bone, as such, they were inert bones that [Bone dominus] could influence even from a distance. The giant hand’s fist closed trapping Sofia in the hole she had carved, she barely avoided getting crushed to death, feeling the finger’s cold, rotting corpses press against her back.

She dug further, the rotting corpses pushing themselves out of the way under her control of their bones, putrid fish juices flowing from their entrails as they were crushed to the sides.

Sofia felt herself falling; the god’s hand was sinking back into the sea.

Not good…

She dug as fast as she could, even using the piercing bolt to speed up the process, until, as cold water was rushing in from behind, she got through the thick layer of rotting corpses and found what looked like some tough dark hide.

Sofia tried to pierce through with her bolt, but it clearly did not have nearly enough mana to be able to pierce that yet, so she grabbed the admin dagger from her bone belt instead, and carved a small hole through the hide as fast as she could. It was extremely thick, but the dagger carved through it effortlessly, exposing some kind of dark flesh underneath.

Pestle.

The tiny fairy left the storage. She did not need any instructions, as Sofia turned back, Pestle sliced through the god’s flesh.

Now was the harder part, the hand was still closed, and it was still sinking, going deeper and deeper under the surface by the second.

Using Bone dominus, Sofia damaged the finger keeping her prisoner of the closed hand, and as soon as she saw an opportunity, used [Summon Self] through a narrow gap to teleport outside of the hand’s grasp.

On the outside, she could see the tentacles all around her, like huge pillars of dead fish, and the abnormally long arm with its grotesque hand that rapidly sunk to the bottom of the sea, disappearing into the dark abyss below. Not wasting any time, she flew up through the water.

It was a matter of seconds before the God noticed that she had escaped. The hand came back up. 

Pareth, chains!

Pareth appeared near Sofia as she swam up. The chains of the four seals appeared, each firmly wrapping around a different finger of the incoming hand, and linking them up to the nearby tentacles. The hand was stopped in its course, if only for an instant. That was all the time Sofia needed to get back to the surface. The chains broke while Pareth teleported back to Sofia then into the storage ring.

The hand followed right after, trying to grab its prey once again.

Sofia threw her scepter along with its piercing bolt to the side. The Scepter flew with the bolt toward one of the tentacles, a normally pretty useless trick Sofia had figured out a while ago. It did nothing to make the bolt more powerful and left her without a weapon, but the added mass gave the bolt immense recoil, propelling her back so hard and fast she was well out of reach of the god’s hand when it closed.

Sofia flew up, and with a single glance at her staff stuck inside of the tentacle it had hit, she stored it in her eye then summoned it back to her hand. 

Again realising it had missed, the god attacked once more. The extended tentacles slammed down.

“My turn!” Bookie cried out as he summoned himself on top of Sofia’s shoulders.

His two frail skeletal hands turned toward the sky, he let the tentacles hit him.

Even with the tentacles blotting out half the sky, more than enough sunlight reached Bookie, his Hero blessing was active, making him completely immune to damage. The tentacles hit Sofia from above, one after the other. Bookie blocked them all like an unbreakable shield.

Despite that, Sofia and Bookie lost altitude every time a tentacle slammed down on them, and the hand made another grabbing motion in their direction.

In a fraction of a second, Sofia rearranged her essence cores in the simplest divine rune she knew, and for the first time in a real battle, she used her racial skill to usurp the power of a real god.

Fuck off! She wished, as her Divinity stat tanked down from 100 to almost zero. And the nearby tentacles along with the rotten hand of the abyssal god were blown away, like hit by an invisible giant hammer. That was the power of Rejection.

She started flying up again, channeling a piercing bolt in each hand as she went, and activating the [Skull Choir] at maximum capacity. Sixty eight Sirhellion skulls appeared in a large ring around Sofia, and before long, they started spewing lightning at the hand and the tentacles down below. Their damage was poor, but the constant barrage of lighting helped charge up Sofia’s avatar form as she tried to think of her next steps. The hand and tentacles would strike again in no time, and she was short on options. The saintomancer’s star couldn’t even be used, as there was a chance the ‘god’ was an undead, which would mean the star would only heal it.

Return inside, Bookie. She ordered, as one of the tentacles tensed up to strike from below.

Altitude still too low. Impossible to dodge… But the angle is fine.

Sofia summoned the Asterite chest under her right as the tentacle struck. It slammed into the chest, which slammed into Sofia, the lid slamming shut above her from the impact. Instead of getting impaled on a tower of dead fish, with a bunch of broken bones and shattered wings, Sofia was sent flying high into the sky.

She wanted to fix her bones as fast as possible, but she had too little time, so she focused on her wings only. When she felt the time was right, she stored the chest back into her eye.

She had been hit so hard and sent flying so fast that she was at the point where the sky turned black from the lack of atmosphere.

Looking down at the tentacles that shot out of the water to pursue her even as she pierced the heavens, she activated the third tier of [Runeforged Overlord] and accelerated up even more.

She had learned about the concept of escape velocity from the random talks during her date with Speed, and knew she couldn’t quite get there by herself yet, even with all of her speed boosts. But with the help of a direct hit from a god? Sofia leveraged every bit of momentum she had and escaped into space. The god’s strange storm did not extend that high, and Sofia watched as she flew, how the gigantic storm seemed to cover the entire planet, leave for the small hole her pendant had carved through.

The god’s tentacles extended up and up stretching towards Sofia, but it seemed they were too short in the end, and could not reach her as she continued to fly away from the planet. The god retracted his disgusting appendages as the storm plugged up the tiny hole Sofia had left.

What now? Do I win? Sofia wondered, continuously feeding more mana to the angel bolts she still held in each hand, doubting that it could be so easy to escape this trial’s design.

The storm cloud underneath started to swirl into a vortex, and slowly, a huge dark green and purple mass emerged from the center of the storm, undescribeably large, the god’s bloated head.