SOM - Chapter 33 - Round Two

[Level 20 Viran - A psion that walks the path of the Seismic Warlord. Core Domains: Marauder, Tyrant, Spear, Earth and Vastness.]

Clearly, Luke wasn’t the only one to have grown since their last encounter. The warlord had used the [Vastness] aether of the [Nightwalker] to progress his own path. It was a shock, but predictable in hindsight.

Luke had assumed the boss would stay the same. Considering his first-hand experience of Frank’s growth, it had been ignorant to believe that an anchor couldn’t behave like a static obstacle, especially considering Rurik’s behaviour. 

Since their first fight, Luke had gained three levels to Maruk’s one, and he hoped that his potent class would let him punch up. 

Much like their last encounter, as Luke and Maruk clashed the rest of the warband held their fire, a great relief for Luke. The warlord opened the fight by thrusting an earth spike into Luke’s back and stabbing into his chest with his obsidian spear. [Brace] took the bite from the attacks, and his armour held up well. 

Rurik had put even more of his soul into the runes this time, and it showed. 

Orange, red and yellow flared as the [Bulwark] powered armour absorbed a combination of thrusts, slashes and strikes. Each attack only contained the minimum force to connect, so didn’t give Luke much stored momentum to play with. 

The way his ability worked was that it was easier to absorb the momentum from one big impact than lots of little ones. His [Wisdom] struggled to keep up with too many attacks at once. 

Maruk was cunning enough to exploit this weakness. Within each flurry of blows, one or two aimed to kill. A stab to the face, a sharpened earth spike to the armpit; these attacks tested Luke’s [Bulwark].

He didn’t break.

Despite Maruk’s towering statue, after a few exchanges, Luke had his measure. The warlord was stronger, but [Vastness] seemed to trade speed for that power. When it came to a raw battle of strength, Luke could hold his own. 

The problem was that a spear as a weapon gave Maruk much greater reach, even without the earth spikes. With stored momentum, Luke closed the distance and swung a hammer blow at the warlord’s side. 

Maruk blocked with his spear shaft and simultaneously counterattacked with an earth spike to the back of Luke’s knees. In return, Luke used a move that had never failed him; he jumped up and head-butted the giant ratling. 

Cartilage crunched as Luke broke the warlord’s long nose, and as he stumbled back Luke placed his last free point into [Empathy] and activated [Null]. 

Blood and gold floated in the air as Luke’s aura warped the laws of physics around it, and Luke used Maruk’s disorientation to land an uppercut blow. The eight-foot tall warlord flew thirty-feet into the air before he fell back down to the ground. 

When the leader got to his feet, he had apparently decided that Luke was a threat that deserved to be taken seriously.

“Kill the defiler,” Maruk roared. 

What had already been a tough fight became a lot harder as the remnants of Maruk’s warband, and those that had respawned, attacked. 

Luke fed aether into his [Singularity] aura, slowing the mad rush of ratlings coming for a piece of him as [Gravity] pressed down on the horde. Even the air felt heavy. Luke wasn’t immune and felt like an elephant was standing on his shoulders, but with his [Strength] the extra weight didn’t slow him. 

Brutal blows sent corpses soaring through the air as he sporadically activated [Null] to disrupt the warband. [Epicentre] was just as effective at catching the ratlings off balance and pulling them into the path of his hammer. Luke was like a baseball player knocking one ball out of the park after another.

Fenn was having a great time. 

Every crunch of bones and splatter of blood caused a wave of elation to pulse from the hammer, which sucked in the blood and coins even more efficiently than Luke doing his [Epicentre] trick. It was like the weapon had seen his technique and figured out how to emulate it. 

The greedy hammer was stealing all his gold!

Though Luke caused havoc with unrestrained violence, he quickly realised why Maruk was giving him breathing room. Standing tall behind rows of his kin, the giant ratling slowly grew until he was fifteen feet tall. At this size, the ratling’s movements noticeably slowed, but the power behind his attacks was enough that Luke couldn’t shrug them off. 

Pillars of hewn stone shot through the air like arrows as the warlord rejoined the fight. Luke dodged one but had to catch the next on his shield. In a panic, he flared [Brace]. The stone spear still knocked him back a dozen paces, and Maruk followed up with a third attack right beneath him, throwing Luke up into the air. 

Without thinking, Luke activated [Null] to avoid falling back down, which worked a little too well. He flew a couple of hundred feet into the air instead of a dozen, and the stone spear followed him the whole way up. When Luke hit the ceiling of the cavern used [Brace] a second before the spear crashed into him. 

The impact winded him, even through his runes and ability, and left him gently floating through the air at the top of the cavern. Luke wasn’t exactly scared of heights, particularly with his superhuman [Endurance], but he wasn’t keen to freefall back to the Warband below. 

As proved earlier, Luke’s control of his [Gravity] powers was tenuous, and he worried if he crash-landed again he would be buried beneath a barrage of stone spears before he could get back up again.

Luke looked down and saw that he was slowly drifting away from the warband. If he was going to fall on anything, he wanted to fall directly on top of the warlord’s enlarged head, so he reached inside his storage space. 

In his brief experiments, he had tried to simulate a rocket ship by squeezing the coke bottle full of water to propel him along. He had packed a few heavy items to throw for this occasion.

However, with his attention on his soul, Luke realised that items weren’t the only thing being stored inside it.

It’s so obvious, Luke thought with a sigh.

Tapping into his stored momentum, Luke angled himself right at Maruk and launched himself forwards. Once his trajectory was on course, he let go of [Null] and gravity reasserted itself with a vengeance.

Falling like an angry meteor, Luke tanked a stone spear, broke through an impromptu dome of hardened earth, and landed right on top of the warlord, activating [Kinetic Strike]. He heard a large crunching noise as he drove Maruk into the ground. 

[Quest complete - Kill the Three-Headed-Rat. Rewards generated from resonance.]

[You have gained enough experience to reach level 14.]

A golden ticket appeared in Luke’s hand. He would have been overjoyed if not for the agony coursing through his left leg. 

Luke had kicked Maruk’s head off, but the landing mangled his leg. He was four times stronger and more durable than a baseline human, but far from invincible.

Inside the broken shell of obsidian that Maruk had manifested to defend himself, Luke ground his teeth. If he called out in pain, ratlings might climb inside the shell, but he clung to hope that at least for a minute or two they might think he had died.

Without hesitation, Luke dumped the attribute points from completing his quest and levelling up into recovery and tried to control the influx of aether to repair his leg. With the temporary boost, and his increased baseline, it should heal in hours instead of weeks, but that wasn’t good enough.

Luke could feel the ambient aether in the air dipping. It wasn’t the only change happening in the dungeon, though. Luke could see one of the giant viran drills through the hole and witnessed it flicker in and out of reality a couple of times, before stabilising. 

At the same time, Luke heard the sounds of ongoing fights occurring outside where he lay. He wasn’t entirely sure what was going on until he heard a stream of curse words that would make a League of Legends player blush. 

Frank, Luke thought in relief. With the pain in his leg, he had forgotten he wasn’t alone this time. 

The white shadow that was his dungeon buddy must have killed enough of the overseers to lead his little revolt. Luke didn’t know how long a few unarmed runts would buy him, but it gave him a little breathing room. 

A ragged gasp escaped Luke’s lips as he accessed the marketplace. Between selling a couple of items for Rurik and his quest reward, he was just shy of thirty-thousand credits. There wasn’t time to browse, so Luke searched for [Recovery] items and bought the most expensive consumable resource he could afford. 

He imagined that ‘Jade Goddess’ would be quite happy when she next checked her balance because he bought five of her overpriced [Primordial Tea Leaves]. 

Instead of making a brew, Luke stuffed them into his mouth and chewed. It might not be the optimal way to extract the peak amount of aether, but was the fastest. Luke focused on all the [Recovery] aspected aether his [System] seed was converting from the unaspected aether of the dungeon. 

Then he extended his aura sense to the bitter-tasting leaves in his mouth. Luke chewed mechanically, ignoring the unpleasant sensation and focusing instead on the tingling warmth that spread through his body. He felt the resonance and pulled with all of his [Will], keeping the mental image of his broken leg healing fixed in his mind.

[+1 Recovery Cultivated.]

Unsure how quickly the aether was working its magic, Luke tried to stand, but his leg gave out beneath him. Even with all the power flowing through him, a broken bone would take more than half a minute to fix. 

Any dream Luke had of waiting it out in the stone shell faded when the manifestation of [Earth] began to crumble around him. Most manifestations weren’t permanent, and the fact that the stone barrier lasted so long after Maruk’s death was unusual. 

Determined to hold his own, or die trying, Luke knelt on his good knee and adopted a defensive posture.

When the shell crumbled, he saw an unexpected sight. 

Like ants swarming over their prey, hundreds of tailless swarmed what remained of the warband. Even though the elites were armed, and a head taller than most of the slaves, they were heavily outnumbered. 

Luke hadn’t realised that there were so many of the workers, nor had he expected Frank to be so successful in leading them to revolt. It took him a few seconds to spot his companion; he heard Frank before he saw him. Frank was the ratling hacking apart a lanky red-robed priest, cursing loudly; Luke had made the mistake of teaching him some English curse words.

It was odd that the [Shadow] cultivating ratling alternated between being a stealthy ghost and the loudest person in the room.

Though Luke kept a watchful eye out for any viran that tried to take advantage of his crippled state, for the most part, the warriors and priests focused on their rebellious slaves. He killed a couple that got too close and used [Epicentre] and [Null] to cause disruption, but for the most part he was reduced to the role of an observer.

Soon the tailless had torn apart the last of the warband, and Luke found himself surrounded once again, but this time by a multitude of curious tailless. Even with a broken leg, Luke cut an imposing figure with his glowing red power armour, sitting atop the corpse of the warlord. 

There was one viran that wasn’t intimidated by Luke in the least, and from the crowd a snow-white ghost covered in blood stepped forwards. Frank hadn’t worn his gifted second-hand armour to let him blend in better, and wielded only a pair of small daggers as weapons, having left his axe at home. 

We did it.