Chapter 795: Ascending The Leaderboards [IV / Bonus - ]

Chapter 795: Ascending The Leaderboards [IV / Bonus Chapter]

The wet stagnant heat of the hollow pressed down like a soaked blanket, heavy with the sharp reek of crushed ferns, scorched bark and the sulfurous haze drifting off the limestone shelves.

Down in the muck, Lupina was moving like a loose lightning bolt.

WHOOSH! WHOOSH!

Her boots barely touched the soggy ground before she rebounded off a slick limestone slab with her three-inch steel claw gauntlets whistling through the air in twin silver arcs.

A heavily armored thorn-crawler lunged out from the shadow of an overhanging root, its petrified wooden mandibles snapping shut with a wet clatter that flung green sap across the moss as Lupina left her claws out of it.

"Aha!"

She planted her left foot, dropped her hips into a low crouch and shoved a thick pulse of beast-kin mana straight down into her right heel.

’Beast-Kin Burst!’

The mana coiled in her leg like a loaded spring, and when it let go, her kick came with a shockwave packed behind it.

Her boot drove upward in a vicious curving kick that caught the crawler right under its armored chin.

KRAAACK!

The sound tore through the hollow like an iron wedge splitting an oak trunk as the two-hundred-pound monster launched into the air like a catapult stone wrapped in briars and cleared fifteen yards of open air in half a heartbeat, flying across the clearing toward the eastern bluff.

...It slammed into the sheer face of the highest rock with a crunch that turned its lower jaw into flying splinters.

SMACK!

The shockwave still wrapped around its wooden shell sent it ricocheting off the stone at an absurd angle.

It whipped back across the gully, letting out a high wooden shriek, and banked off a mossy overhang on the other side.

THUD!

It picked up even more speed and clipped an angled boulder jutting out of the creek bed...

PING!

The spinning carcass zipped across the clearing like a slime-coated pinball, tumbling end over end in a whistling blur of broken legs and shattered bark.

Ten yards ahead, Ther’Abella was in the middle of a textbook Viridian Guard advance.

Her boots were planted with perfect elven balance, and her starlight staff was raised high as she sent out a pair of cutting crescents that split two lunging vine-lashers in half.

Her shoulders were squared, her chin was lifted with dignified poise, and her breathing flowed in slow measured cycles.

’We’ll finish this quickly...’

She was a centuries-old officer of the Viridian Guard, a perfect picture of discipline in the middle of all this chaos...

WHAM!

The ricocheting crawler hit Ther’Abella dead center between the shoulder blades with the full force of a runaway ore cart as the air left her lungs in a sharp undignified wheeze.

"HURK!"

Her starlight staff burst into sparkling dust as the hit blew her clean out of her stance.

She flew forward five yards with her arms windmilling helplessly in the humid air, and then she plowed face-first into a deep bubbling trough of stagnant sulfurous mud.

SPLORCH!

A heavy curtain of black muck and rotting moss sprayed up in every direction and showered the ferns around her.

Silence hung over that corner of the hollow for two full seconds as the only sound was the wet gurgle of the mud slowly filling in around her.

Then, slowly and painfully, two slender gloved hands planted themselves in the muck.

Ther’Abella pushed her upper body up out of the trough, grinding her teeth so hard the sound carried over the hiss of the spore pods.

A thick sheet of black peat and yellow algae slid down her face and dripped off the tip of her nose.

Her silver hair was matted into reeking tangled clumps, and a stray water fern was plastered right across her left eyelid.

Her neck turned with the slow creak of an overwound ballista winch until her cold blue eyes locked onto the silver-haired wolf-girl standing thirty paces back.

’That mangy flea-bitten tail-wagging ditch dog...’ Ther’Abella cursed in the boiling depths of her pride, her constellation marks pulsing with sputtering starlight. ’She aimed that thing at my spine on purpose! She saw me holding the flank perfectly and couldn’t stand how sloppy she looks next to me...! If she thinks she can humiliate me with a flying log, I’ll shave that fluffy tail of hers bald and use it to scrub the latrines!’

Lupina stood frozen on the balls of her feet with one claw still half-raised.

Her wolf ears twitched forward, then pinned flat against her hair in genuine startled guilt as her bushy tail dropped and tucked itself between her legs.

"Ah... hey, pointy-ears!" Lupina called, waving a steel-clawed hand with a sheepish grin that showed every one of her fangs. "My bad! That kick had a little too much juice in it! I didn’t mean to bounce it off three rocks and into your back!"

She paused, then brightened. "But hey, it was a really good bounce, right?! Did you see the angle on the last one?!"

Ther’Abella’s only answer was a low groan like a wounded mountain cat and dragged her boots out of the bog one at a time.

SHLUUURP! GLOP!

She spat a mouthful of black peat onto the stone, wiped the algae out of her eyes with the back of her forearm and rolled her shoulders back until the joints popped one after another.

KRK! KRK!

Then her boots found solid stone.

With a sudden furious snap of her spine, she flipped backward into the air and landed lightly on the edge of a low ledge, right in front of three lunging thorn-crawlers.

Starlight burst to life in her palms and hardened into twin curved daggers of silver light that hissed against the damp air.

SHING!

The first crawler’s head fell into the mud before its claws touched the ground.

SHHRAK!

She spun on the ball of her right foot and drove her left heel into the chest of the second one, cracking its bark shell and pinning it to the stone under her weight while her other dagger plunged straight down through the back of its skull.

KRUNCH!

The third crawler leaped for her throat.

Without even looking at it, she flicked her wrist backward, and the dagger in her hand went through its open mouth and out the back of its head.

SHLUNK!

Ther’Abella flicked the green sap off her daggers with two sharp snaps of her wrists and tossed her ruined hair back over her shoulder, which flung a clump of mud straight into the face of a vine-spitter behind her.

The spitter reared back, sputtering, and she spun and cut it down mid-sputter without even turning all the way around.

SHHRAK!

’Better,’ she thought, her chin rising back up to its proper height. ’Much better... That’s how a real warrior fights.’

A high-pitched chittering hiss tore through the ferns to her right.

Ther’Abella’s ears twitched.

A razor-bark stalker burst out from under the drooping fronds, a lean six-legged monster with jagged scythe-like front legs built for lightning ambushes.

It was coming at a terrifying sprint with its claws skittering across the slick stone in a low blinding charge aimed straight at her hip.

Ther’Abella’s lips curled into a dark feral smirk.

’Oh, perfect...’ she thought, her eyes narrowing as she measured its angle with spiteful precision. ’Run straight at me, you ugly little splinter. I’ll catch that scythe on my dagger, turn on my heel and send all of that lovely momentum right back where it came from. I’m going to punt you across this whole hollow like a ballista bolt... straight into the back of that dog’s skull! Let’s see how many rocks she bounces off when fifty pounds of bark smacks her in the ear!’

A nasty vindictive giggle bubbled up in her throat, and her muscles coiled for the perfect parry.

"Heh... hehehe..."

She braced her boots, leveled her left dagger and got ready to swing the monster straight at Lupina’s head...

FWOOOOM!

A wall of suffocating heat came crashing down out of the sky.

The air in the middle of the ledge warped with black sulfur and boiling pressure as a tall figure dropped out of a leap and landed right in the path of the charge, cutting across Ther’Abella’s line of sight like a falling mountain.

THOOM!

Before Ther’Abella could even blink, a long arm in heavy mythril plate swept out as the back of a spiked mythril gauntlet caught the flat of Ther’Abella’s chest.

WHUMP!

The strength behind it was absurd and completely effortless.

Ther’Abella’s feet left the stone entirely as her perfect parry stance vanished, and she was flung sideways like a dry leaf caught in a hurricane.

"Wait, you—" Ther’Abella shrieked, and the rest of it was lost as she spun twenty yards through the air.

KLAK!

She clipped the sloped edge of a raised boulder.

BONK!

She bounced off its mossy top.

FWSSSH!

She skimmed straight across the top of a thick patch of ferns and tumbled clean out of the fight, rolling end over end toward the ridge.

Standing dead center on the ledge where the elf had been a second ago, Morrighan lowered her gauntlet.

The tall demon didn’t even glance in the direction she’d thrown the elf.

Her long crimson hair drifted lazily over the dark curves of her mythril armor, and her curved obsidian horns gleamed with a dull dangerous sheen in the filtered light.

Her face was as still as carved stone, but behind her armored legs, her heavy spade-tipped tail gave one sharp irritated twitch against the rock.

’I dislike that woman...’ Morrighan thought, her molten gold eyes narrowing into slits. ’...A lot.’

Morrighan could feel emotions, she was a demon after all.

They hummed constantly in the back of her mind, the tides of fear, rage, joy and hunger from every living thing in the hollow and Ther’Abella’s had just spiked with such a petty, giggling, spiteful little burst of glee aimed at Lupina that it had felt like an oily needle jabbed into Morrighan’s temple.

...If the elf wanted to play childish games while Lord Silas was watching, she could go play them in the weeds.

The razor-bark stalker, having had its target thrown out of the way, didn’t even have time to change course.

It lunged blindly at Morrighan’s waist instead with its petrified scythes whistling toward her hip however Morrighan caught the left scythe in her bare gauntlet and crushed the petrified wood to dust in her armored fist.

KRRRUNCH!

With her right hand, she drove her spiked knuckles straight down onto the back of the monster’s head and smashed it into the bedrock so hard that cracks raced out across the stone around it.

BAM!

The stalker’s body twitched once and went limp.

Morrighan straightened up, and her crimson bangs parted to show the cold calculating fire burning in her eyes.

’The wolf is ahead,’ Morrighan thought, her gaze sweeping across the churning sea of monsters crawling out of the cave. ’Aurelia took ten with her holy fire... Rowenna took eighteen with that trick in the air and Lupina thinks she can win this just because she bounces off walls like an untrained puppy...’

Her heavy spade tail swung once and cut through the humid air with a low whistle.

WHOOOSH!

’Lord Silas promised a reward to whoever kills the most,’ Morrighan thought, a deep possessive hunger rising in her chest. ’I need to kill a lot more of them. If anyone gets his attention tonight, it’s going to be me. At the very least... Lord Silas has to train me. He’ll have to check my form himself, put his hands on my stance and correct my grip... I’m not letting a wolf take that away from me.’

Up on the ridge, Silas felt the sudden explosive shift in the demon’s mana.

He blinked, focused on her tall silhouette and pulled up her tab with a thought.

[Title]: Abyssal Brimstone Hero

[Mana]: 4800 / 4800

[Active & Passive Skills]:

[Brimstone Punch]: Wraps her spiked mythril gauntlet in a roaring vortex of dark brimstone flame that detonates on impact, cratering the ground around the target. (Cost: 200 Mana/cast)

[Brimstone Bolt]: Hurls a smoky fireball of dark demonic fire from both palms. (Cost: 120 Mana/cast)

[Demon’s Resolve]: Wraps her body in a crimson-and-black aura and lights her horns with abyssal light, doubling her strength, speed and durability. Drains her stamina quickly. (Cost: 400 Mana/activation)

[Abyssal Chains]: Summons shadow-forged chains from the ground that bind a target’s limbs and drain their stamina. (Cost: 150 Mana/cast)

[Mark of the Abyss]: Brands a target with a crimson sigil that increases all damage it takes by 25% and halves its mana regeneration. (Cost: 100 Mana/cast)

[Demonic Cursed Circles]: Spins dozens of pitch-black cursed magic circles across a fifty-yard radius, turning the ground beneath them to ash. (Cost: 300 Mana/activation)

[Abyssal Empathy]: Senses the emotions of everyone around her. (Passive)

[More]

’Oh, she’s cutting loose,’ Silas thought, a broad appreciative smirk tugging at his lips. ’If Morrighan stops guarding and starts counting bodies, this hollow’s not going to have much left...’

Down on the ledge, Morrighan’s eyes flashed.

’Demon’s Resolve!’