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Duskbound Chapter 72

The centipedes practically stood still while he killed them, offering no appreciable resistance to his spear strikes. The moment they were dead, he was in the air, rising on a powerful jump and spear in both hands to swing the bladed edge through an arm like a lumberjack felling a sapling. It wasn’t what the weapon was designed for, but [Shape Shifting] helped and he had strength to spare.

He’d already severed three arms when the pained screams started. Even in...

Duskbound Chapter 71

When he’d been a child, Velik had learned some basic woodcraft from a transient woodsman who’d come through the frontier. His parents had quickly and loudly objected to their son spending time with a vagabond, no matter how good natured the man was. Velik had never seen him again.

The cobbler’s wife had been a favorite of all the children in Deshir for years. Though she wasn’t a classed chef, she’d been an avid baker and more than generous with the fruits of her labors. Velik ...

Duskbound Chapter 70

The first indication that he wasn’t alone was a peculiar plopping sound that Velik had first heard a few days ago in the upper reaches of the flesh caves. His eyes snapped over to the entrance, but of course there was nothing to see. There hadn’t been last time, either.

He’d only been destroying the corruption seeds for about ten minutes and had barely even started to clear off the first of the fleshy, melted-candle-shaped pillars, but he wasn’t going to let himself get trapped ...

Book 5, Chapter 59

I took a few seconds to just breathe. It was over. Ammun was gone. His soul had been released from its phylactery and passed into the reincarnation cycle. Someday, it would return as a new person, one without all its memories from over a thousand years as a lich. That was probably for the best, as that soul had been abused in a way that defied words.

A few seconds was all I could afford at the moment, unfortunately. My injuries quickly made themselves known to me, intruding on my moment...

Book 5, Chapter 58

Bones were a lot more fragile than people gave them credit for. Comparatively, they were stronger than skin and muscle, but in the grand scheme of things, there was a reason nobody built tools out of animal bones when they had other, better resources on hand.

That was before magic came into play, however. Human bones were nothing special. Animal bones, no matter how large they got, were never useful as more than ornamentation. But monsters had a tendency to get so big that normal bones ...

Duskbound Vacation Week

Hi guys, I meant to put this as an author's note in today's post but forgot. I'm taking a week off from DB so I can focus on the last few chapters of my other story, and also because it's both the holidays and because I am very sick right now. Next chapter will be Monday, Jan 6th. Sorry about the short notice.

Keiran chapters will continue to update as normal (yay backlog) and hopefully, the next time I get sick, I'll have enough DB chapters stockpiled that you guys will never even know...

Duskbound Chapter 69

The fleshy coating on the walls wasn’t uniform in any way. It had varying texture, smooth in some places and rough in others, and a smattering of scars. There were long, jagged slices that had healed into puckered scars and small circles from where it had been stabbed or punctured all over. Veins as thick as Velik’s arm formed massive webs, sometimes standing out in distinct ridges along the walls.

One thing he hadn’t seen up until this moment was an eye. In fact, even with his me...

Book 5, Chapter 57

A band of force girdled my stomach, serving as a tourniquet to put pressure on a wound I couldn’t really feel. It was serious enough that had I still had a normal human body, it might have been the end of me, but as things currently stood, it was more of an annoying distraction that happened to put a timer on this battle than anything else. I’d heal from it, but not while I was in the middle of a fight. If I couldn’t finish Ammun off in time, I’d have to retreat.

And that was un...

Duskbound Chapter 68

Much like the scorplings, the monsters that the system called stone leg centipedes attacked with the strength of numbers and a venomous bite on their side. Unlike the scorplings, however, they were easily able to cling to the walls and ceiling while skittering around at full speed.

Velik’s limbs were a blur as he lashed out with his spear, slicing through the reinforced hides of the monsters with every blow. Guts and gore splattered to the ground along with long, twitching bodies, hun...

Book 5, Chapter 56

Ammun’s shadow rejoined the fight about twenty seconds later, which, while entirely expected, didn’t make things any easier for me to deal with. Suddenly, I had twice as many spells coming at me, with a disproportionate number of them being attacks on my mind. That was a losing strategy on Ammun’s part, and I knew that he knew better. More attempts at distracting me the same way wouldn’t make it more difficult to shrug them off, so I had to assume he was trying something else.

W...

Duskbound Chapter 67

Velik paused in front of the corpse of the scorpling brood mother. There was less of it there, somehow, like the dungeon itself was slowly reclaiming it. He didn’t have time to stand and watch, but he imagined an invisible mouth taking tiny little bites out of the monster, just nibbling away until it reached the inevitable conclusion.

He wondered if the dungeon was feeding the seed mana directly from the monster in front of him, and more importantly, how long it would take for a new o...

Book 5, Chapter 55

I was willing to bet that Ammun hadn’t felt pain in a thousand years or more. His soul might be writhing in tortured agony every moment, but the copy of his mind that piloted that skeleton didn’t feel any of that. Getting lit up by a mana burn spell was not the way to gently ease someone back into that particular facet of the human condition.

Regardless of his motivations, he’d decided he was done talking. There were no more threats, taunts, or insults. The next few minutes of my ...

Duskbound Chapter 66

Sildra had been impressed with Jensen’s work. He was quick, decisive, and devastatingly accurate with that bow of his. When the monsters had threatened to overwhelm them, he’d magically pulled something out of nowhere to turn the battle around. She’d been quite taken by his performance.

Then she’d accompanied Torwin to Beldrit the night he’d returned. He’d needed her [Eye of the Moon] skill to confirm the corrupted seed bearers were entirely purged, and...

Book 5, Chapter 54

Up to this point, we’d mostly been testing each other and buying time. At first, I’d thought that Ammun was just stalling to give his worker golems more time to build his control silo, but as soon as I’d applied any cursory amount of critical thinking to that idea, it fell apart. It didn’t matter if the silo was finished while I was here. It wasn’t like Ammun could use it on me when I was right next to him. The best he could hope for was to threaten to destroy some place he thought ...

Duskbound Chapter 65

Author's Note: As of today, the $10 tier is fully online and is 20 chapters ahead of RR (15 chapters ahead of this tier).

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Velik ended up spending another hour taking care of the remaining scorplings. Rather than fight them in the cavern, he retreated to the tunnels again and ambushed them in small groups as they spread out to look for him. The fights were challenging more in that he hadn’t slept in days and was exhausted from killing that champion, but he ...

Book 5, Chapter 53

I’d done my best to keep this conversation going now that I was here, not because I wanted to talk to my former apprentice, but to give my shadow time to break the first ward stone. As soon as that happened, the fight was guaranteed to kick off, and I’d have to hold my own against Ammun, his shadow, and his squadron of golems while my shadow went after the second ward stone.

I was hoping the defenses wouldn’t be radically different at the second location, but there wasn’t enough...

Duskbound Chapter 64

As far as defensive traits went, sheer size was a good one. Even with a vulnerability identified and in reach, Velik lacked the range to give the brood mother a deep, fatal wound. The champion elite was by far the largest monster he’d ever fought. The fake Velik was a close second, but it just didn’t have the massive solidity this champion displayed.

His spear dug deep, the haft fully three feet inside the brood mother, but it was spinning about so wildly in an attempt to throw him ...

Duskbound Chapter 63

As many scorplings as he’d killed, Velik didn’t have much trouble keeping up with the waves chasing him down. He was nimble enough to keep them from reaching him in groups larger than two or three, but there were some issues avoiding the champion elite. It still hadn’t focused its attention on him, and it was still bleeding profusely from the single wound he’d dealt it. If that was enough to kill it, it’d be the easiest champion he’d fought so far.

He wasn’t betting on it,...

Duskbound Chapter 62

Velik felt the exact moment the sun went down, even though he hadn’t seen the sky in going on three days now. A measure of weariness sloughed off his limbs mid-fight, and the scorplings he was slowly cutting his way through all of a sudden felt slow and clumsy to him.

[You have advanced to level 34. +2 Physical, +1 Mental, +2 free points.]

He put the two free points into mystic, as he’d been doing for the last few levels, though he started to suspect burning f...

Duskbound Chapter 61

“And then I spent about twenty thousand decarmas storming the building and killing the corrupted seed bearers inside,” Jensen said. “We got everyone we could out and retreated into the forest, but it’s been slow going with… well, look around and you’ll see why.”

“Injured, children, low levels and lack of wilderness survival skills,” Torwin said, nodding as he listed off some of the reasons their progress had stalled. “Still, an encampment in the middle of the woods? ...

Duskbound Chapter 60

Author's Note: I finally got my backlog far enough ahead tonight to bring mid-tier online and offer an additional five chapters. Next goal: reach twenty chapters ahead of RR for high-tier subscribers.

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Veilk sat with his back against the wall, his spear laid out next to his leg, and took shallow breaths as he watched the hallway through half-closed eyes. For two days now, he’d been fighting an unending battle with the monsters that filled the bizarre under...

Duskbound Chapter 59

The assassin scorpling was proving to be more worthy a hunt than Velik had given it credit for. It had been close to an hour now, and the amoral giant bug had stayed ahead of him by leading him on a merry chase through piles of its allies. He’d lost track of how many monsters he’d killed pursuing that bug, but he hadn’t given up.

Which Is stupid of you, he admonished himself. You might not be lost, but you’re letting this thing lead you into ambush after ambush...