Chapter 793: Ascending The Leaderboards [II]

The thick rolling clouds of black smoke and swirling ash from Elowynn’s blasts had thrown up a wall across the middle of the slope that nobody could see through.

Taking advantage of it, a pack of five huge old thorn-crawlers came bursting through the curtain of burning brush, their hides covered in thick plates of petrified ironwood that had held up against the edges of the blasts.

Their heavy claws tore through the scorched moss as they lunged forward with horrifying speed, pushing through the flames toward the gap between the front line and the sides.

Their jaws were open wide, with thick strings of acidic drool dripping off their wooden mandibles, and they were aimed straight at the exposed side of the line.

Ther’Abella skidded to a dead stop on the slick stone with her boots gouging two deep trenches through the mud.

Her cold blue eyes narrowed to razor points, and the starlight running through her body surged straight up into them.

VWOOOM!

Her eyes blazed with a terrifying liquid glow of pure starlight, and thin silver lines spread out across her temples like glowing constellations.

Deep inside, a fierce wicked grin spread through her, dark and completely merciless.

’Finally...’ Ther’Abella thought, gritting her teeth with venomous satisfaction as she stared down the charging monsters. ’After all of that humiliation, after getting punched into the dirt by that horned demon, after getting hauled around over that usurper’s shoulder like a sack of turnips in front of everyone... I’ve finally got something I can tear apart with my own hands! All of that frustration... I’m going to shove every last drop of it down your miserable throats!’

Ther’Abella’s silver hair flared outward as she cut loose.

She swept her starlight staff through the air, her slender body twisting with deadly acrobatic precision.

SHHHRAAAK!

The staff threw out a thin three-foot crescent of solid starlight that whistled through the air with a high piercing shriek.

The first crawler didn’t even have time to snap its jaws shut.

The starlight sheared straight through its ironwood skull and split the huge monster cleanly in half from snout to tail... The two halves slapped down into the mud on either side of her with the cut glowing and smoking from the heat of the starlight.

Before the second one could close the distance, Ther’Abella lunged forward and crossed the five paces between them in a single smooth step.

She spun the staff behind her back, pulled the starlight into her left hand and thrust her open palm forward.

SHUNK! SHUNK! SHUNK!

Five glowing spears of solid starlight shot out of her fingertips and punched through the second crawler’s chest plates with sickening wet cracks.

She vaulted over its collapsing spine, landed lightly on the third crawler’s snout and used its head as a stepping stone to drive her staff straight down like a stake.

KRUNCH!

The starlight staff went straight through the monster’s neck and pinned it to the stone underneath in a burst of pale blue blood and splintered bark.

She didn’t stop for breath.

With a fierce shout that echoed across the hollow, she ripped the staff free and spun through the mist in an unbroken storm of silver light.

The fourth crawler lost both of its front legs before it could lunge, and she caved in its armored skull on the backswing.

The fifth one leaped at her back, and she ducked under it and opened its belly from end to end with one long upward slash.

THWUMP!

It landed behind her in two pieces, and she didn’t even turn around.

Just past the edge of Ther’Abella’s slaughter, Aki was moving like a whirlwind of blue steel.

She dashed forward, her boots kicking up sprays of gray muck as she sprinted straight into the thick of the swarm.

Her azure eyes were glowing with a bright focused light, but even with all the chaos around her, she kept her affinity locked down tight.

She didn’t call up the purple flames of Destruction... They were still weak compared to her father’s, they wore her out fast, and if she used them here, they’d erase the very hides and meat her territory needed.

So Aki fought with her fists.

Her royal mana surged over her skin in a thick shimmering aura of pale blue light, strengthening every muscle and speeding up her reflexes to a frightening degree.

A big armored thorn-crawler lunged at her from the left with its sharp wooden quills snapping out like daggers.

At the same time, a second one sprang off a stone ledge on her right with its heavy claws aimed right at her neck.

Aki didn’t flinch.

She dropped her weight by three inches and swept her left forearm up in a tight parry.

CLANG!

The left crawler’s quills hit her steel bracer and glanced off the angled metal in a bright shower of sparks.

Without losing any momentum, Aki drove her right elbow back with explosive force.

KRAK!

The steel point of her shoulder plate hammered straight into the crawler’s eye socket and caved its skull in on contact.

As it fell, Aki twisted her hips and brought her right leg around in a blinding roundhouse kick that slammed into the second crawler’s jaw.

KRUNCH!

The royal mana covering her greaves shattered its petrified teeth and snapped its neck sideways, and its limp body went spinning ten paces through the air before it crashed lifelessly into the ferns.

From the shadow of a fern right in front of her, a hulking bramble brute, its body made of knotted muscular briars and thick roots, brought a huge four-foot arm of petrified wood smashing down at her head.

WHOOOSH!

Aki pivoted on the ball of her right foot and swayed backward with smooth breathtaking grace as the heavy wooden club slammed into the ground right where she’d been standing, gouging a big crater in the stone.

BAM!

Before the brute could get its balance back, Aki darted forward along the length of its outstretched arm.

Her hands blurred into three lightning-fast palm strikes, and her royal mana burst against the joints of its body in sharp rapid shocks.

THUD! THUD! THUD!

The huge wooden brute shuddered violently as the shocks ripped through it from the inside.

With a dry groaning crack, its body split open, and it collapsed into a heap of smoking firewood.

’All the training with Ther’Abella and Elowynn is paying off...’

Maybe after a while, she would be on the same level as Alexander in hand to hand combat.

WHOOSH!

Aki didn’t stop to watch it fall.

Three more crawlers came scrambling over the brute’s collapsing body at her, and she met them head-on.

She caught the first one’s lunge on her forearm, twisted her whole body and slammed it down into the stone so hard the ledge cracked under it.

The second one leaped for her throat, and she snapped her head back, let its jaws close on empty air an inch from her chin and drove an uppercut up into its belly that lifted it clean off its feet.

WHAM!

The third one went for her legs... She jumped straight up over it, came down with both heels on the back of its neck and felt it crunch under her greaves.

KRRRUNCH!

She landed in a crouch on top of its twitching body, her fists still raised and her chest heaving, and the blue glow of her royal mana flared brighter around her shoulders.

’Faster,’ Aki thought, her heart racing. ’I can go faster than this...’

Two smaller crawlers tried to rush her from both sides while her back was turned, but Aki didn’t even look.

She dropped flat into a full split under their lunges, swept both legs around in a wide low scissor kick that shattered their knees, and sprang back up in one smooth motion, driving both armored fists straight through their chests at the same time.

KRAAACK!

Aki straightened up and shook the green slime off her steel knuckles with a sharp satisfied flick of her wrists.

Her chest rose and fell in steady controlled breaths, and a faint sheen of sweat glistened along her collarbones.

Her blue hair fluttered in the warm draft, and her cheeks were flushed with the thrill of the fight.

With a sudden nervous flutter in her stomach, Aki quickly turned her head to look back up at the ridge where Silas was standing.

He was standing tall against the sky with his dark hair ruffled by the wind, and he caught her looking.

He gave her an easy warm wave and a slow approving nod that made her heart skip a frantic beat.

Aki’s lips burst into a bright triumphant smile, and her eyes sparkled with pure joy...

"Aki, dodge!" Silas’s deep voice roared down from the ridge immediately after and Aki didn’t question it for a second.

She trusted that voice with every part of her, and she threw her whole body sideways, twisting in midair as she kicked off the slick mud.

WHOOOOSH!

A huge barbed tendril as thick as a tree trunk whipped through the empty space where her head had been less than a heartbeat ago, its razor-sharp thorns scraping across the cheek guard of her helmet.

SKREEEEECH!

The barbed tendril tore into the stone ledge where Aki had been standing and split it apart in a spray of white rock and sour green sap.

Aki landed in a low crouch with her boots skidding across the slick moss.

The plates of her armor scraped together, and she pushed off her back foot before the tendril could pull back.

Her right hand drove forward in an open palm strike wrapped in a pale blue glow of royal mana, and it hit the thick stem right below its thorns.

KRAAACK!

The tendril snapped like dry pine.

The severed tip thrashed around in the mud, spurting sticky sap, while the rest of the stalk whipped back into the thick undergrowth of the hollow.

"Form the line!" Ther’Abella’s command cut over the hiss of the spore pods.

The five new Shieldmaidens moved like one body.

Their heavy boots drove into the muck, and they planted their heels in the soft ground as they brought their Blessed Land shields together edge to edge.

The polished steel rims met with a ringing snap and locked into a solid wall that blocked off the lower ledge.

CLANG!

A wave of thorn-crawlers slammed straight into the steel.

The impact shuddered through all five of them, but the Blessed Land armor took the shock.

The Shieldmaiden in front dropped her shoulder and braced against the inside of her shield, while the girl beside her drove her sword through the narrow gap between their shields.

SHUNK!

The steel punched straight through the bark shell of a lunging crawler, and green fluid hissed against the hot metal.

The Shieldmaiden ripped the blade free with a sharp twist, and the crawler dropped into the mud, twitching as its legs curled in.

"Hold the wall!" the girl in the middle shouted, driving her own sword into the throat of another crawler that tried to climb over the top. "Push them back!"

Behind the wall of shields, Aki’s archers drew their bows together... The bows creaked in the humid air, and then came the dry snap of the strings letting go.

TWANG! TWANG! TWANG!

A volley of iron-tipped arrows arced over the Shieldmaidens’ helmets and rained down into the squirming mass of vine-spitters rooted twenty paces back.

The arrows punched into their swollen petal mouths and pinned them to the roots before they could spit.

Two of the spitters burst under the barrage and sprayed corrosive sludge all over the crawlers below them, and the crawlers shrieked as the bile ate through their wooden scales.

The spear girls didn’t wait for the second volley.

They poured around both ends of the shield wall in a screaming rush, their spears leveled at chest height, and slammed into the side of the swarm before the crawlers could turn to face them.

Steel points punched through bark and drove deep into the soft pulp underneath.

One of the girls planted her spear in a crawler’s open mouth and ran it straight back into the mud, then vaulted over its thrashing body with the shaft still in her hands and yanked it free on the way down.

SHLUNK!

Another crawler leaped at her from the side.

The girl beside her swung her spear around like a club and cracked it across the monster’s snout hard enough to knock it out of the air, and before it could get back up, three more spearheads came down through its back and pinned it to the ground.

THUNK! THUNK! THUNK!

"Push!" the Shieldmaiden in the middle roared.

The shield wall took one big step forward together, then another, and the crawlers piled up against the steel were shoved back down the slope in a tangled heap of thrashing legs.

The Shieldmaidens stabbed down into the heap over the tops of their shields again and again with their swords rising and falling in a steady brutal rhythm, while the archers behind them kept loosing arrow after arrow into anything that tried to crawl out of it.

TWANG! THWACK! TWANG! THWACK!

The new girls’ faces were splattered green with sap, and their arms were shaking, but not one of them took a step back.