Chapter 169: Sacrifice

Jaxir had learned one particularly useful thing while letting the Colossus throw half the cavern at his head, and that was that the boulders didn’t fracture randomly no matter how chaotic the spread looked afterward.

The pattern started with how the golem held the stone, with the heaviest fracture points forming where its fingers last touched and almost directly opposite that position. When the boulder finally broke apart, the cracks spread outward from that hemispheric line like a spiderweb wrapped around a sphere, leaving fewer fragments traveling through that region than anywhere else.

The problem was that the boulder spun rapidly after leaving the golem’s hand, which made tracking those safer angles almost impossible unless Jaxir watched the throw from the very beginning.

Another slab of stone ripped free from the ground as the Colossus drew its arm back, giving Jaxir enough time to fix the exact position of its fingers in his mind before the throwing motion started. The arm blurred forward and the boulder launched across the cavern, already rotating hard enough that its original orientation would’ve become impossible to follow by sight alone.

Jaxir raised his staff and released three Casts in quick succession, each one serving a different purpose as the boulder raced toward him.

The first barely disturbed the projectile at all, but the point of impact gave him a much clearer read on its speed and rotation, while the second struck slightly off-center and slowed the spin without significantly changing its path. The third finally nudged the entire boulder several degrees to one side, shifting where the safer section of the coming explosion would pass.

Jaxir moved with the change instead of away from it.

By now he had already spent several throws learning how much each Cast altered the stone’s movement. Sometimes all three attacks had been little more than tests to collect information, while other times he adjusted the spin and trajectory just enough to put himself where the fewest fragments would travel.

Once he understood the pattern, the golem’s wide-area attack became far less oppressive than it had seemed at first.

The boulder exploded and a storm of stone tore across the cavern, but Jaxir walked through the thinnest section of the spread while fragments screamed past either side of him. A few smaller pieces still struck the Aegis and shaved away some of the stored mana, yet the loss was nothing compared to what the attack had done earlier. More importantly, Jaxir’s attention was no longer fixed on the projectiles at all.

The Colossus’s body had been bothering him for some time. Everything about its defenses suggested that what he was seeing wasn’t actually the creature itself. Every attack that broke through the stone only caused an outer layer to flake away, after which fresh earth crawled over the opening and rebuilt whatever damage Jaxir had managed to cause.

It seemed, then, that the Colossus’ body was more like an armor hiding something within, typical for most golems.

Jaxir still hadn’t seen the real target, but by now he was fairly certain he knew where it was. The Colossus bent down to tear another boulder from the ground while Jaxir ignored its arms and instead watched its feet, focusing on the movement that had felt wrong since the beginning of the fight.

For something so large and cumbersome, its footing changed far too smoothly whenever it turned or shifted its weight.

One foot was always connected to the earth, even when it looked like the golem had lifted it completely. Some small portion of stone remained joined to the ground while another section reshaped itself, letting the connection transfer so smoothly that it created the illusion of ordinary movement. That was when he understood.

The Colossus wasn’t lumbering after him because it couldn’t, and its real core had never been housed inside the visible body at all. Instead, something beneath the battlefield remained connected to the construct through the earth, which explained the endless regeneration, the control over nearby stone, and why the creature never fully separated both feet from the ground. Not to mention how antsy it got when Jaxir got closed.

The gigantic body was simply the part meant to draw attention away from what truly mattered.

Another boulder flew, and Jaxir answered with three more Casts before it had crossed half the distance between them. The first confirmed the rotation, the second slowed it, and the third shifted the trajectory just enough that Jaxir could step into the path he’d already calculated. When the boulder burst apart, the lowest-density section of debris opened around him exactly as expected.

His hair lifted in the rushing air and settled again as he continued forward, moving toward the invisible boundary where the Colossus’s close-range control had activated every time before. Jaxir had spent the entire fight learning that distance as carefully as he had learned the boulders, and he knew almost exactly where the creature would react.

The moment his next step crossed that line, mana surged through the ground beneath his feet.

The earth bucked and a stone spike began forcing its way upward, but Jaxir’s staff was already angled toward the ground before the attack fully formed. Silvery-blue light gathered at its tip as he compressed the Cast into one narrow line rather than allowing the mana to spread outward like his normal attacks.

Then the beam erupted straight down.

The concentrated Cast tore through the rising spike before continuing into the earth beneath Jaxir, drilling through stone with far more force than any of the attacks he had wasted on the Colossus’s outer shell. The golem roared above him, but the sound died almost as quickly as it began. A heartbeat later, the light inside its eyes vanished.

Jaxir grinned as cracks spread across the enormous stone body and the structure began collapsing under its own weight. Its knees gave first before the rest followed, tons of rock crashing across the cavern floor now that whatever had been controlling them was gone. The core had been exactly where Jaxir expected it to be.

The Colossus’s size had been the deception that made the trick work. Anyone looking at something that enormous would naturally assume its most important parts were somewhere inside its chest or head.

In reality, the buried core had remained connected through the ground while the visible body acted as an extension that could be endlessly repaired and reshaped. It was clever, just not clever enough once Jaxir stopped attacking what the creature wanted him to see.

[You have defeated Ancestral Obsidian Colossus (Elite) Lv22]

Jaxir waited for the experience and whatever rewards an Elite regional boss thirteen Levels above him was supposed to give, but another notification appeared before anything else happened. His smile started fading as he read the first line, then disappeared completely by the time he reached the second.

[Experience and rewards have been claimed as sacrifice.]

[Recipient: Mage Conjurer God]

Jaxir’s lip twitched as he stared at the notification. After spending twenty-two mana potions preparing for this fight, losing the entire payout felt especially insulting.

"You cheap bastard," he muttered, but white light swallowed him before he could come up with anything more appropriate. The cavern vanished around him.

Black crystal returned a moment later and Jaxir found himself standing inside the Black Gem Alpha’s chamber again, though he remained there for barely long enough to recognize where he was.

The enormous wolf had only just started lifting its head when another wave of light gathered around Jaxir, giving him no time to ask what was happening or recover from the first teleportation. His expression twisted the moment he realized he was being moved again.

"You’ve gotta be kidding me..."

Space folded before the complaint had even finished leaving his mouth, and Jaxir reappeared with one boot already slipping from a strip of rotten bark. Both arms shot outward as he caught his balance, only then realizing that he was standing on the remains of an old tree growing almost horizontally from the side of a cliff. Open air stretched beneath his heels while mist hid whatever waited at the bottom.

Jaxir looked down for several seconds, then very carefully shifted his weight back toward the trunk without making any sudden movements. The branch beneath him creaked in response, which did very little to improve his opinion of the situation. His eye twitched as he stared out over the drop.

"These people are fucking annoying."