Chapter 356
Chapter 356
Large mangled chunks of metal and stone were all that was left of the gate, and now there was a gaping wide hole in the front of the altar big enough for two hundred people to walk through side by side. Draconic golems were pouring out of sealed off defensive bubbles, the ones that’d withstood Riven’s blood nova anyway, and they quickly formed a defensive line with halberds pointed at the oncoming army over large metal towershields.
“FIRE ALL YOU’VE GOT!” A defending dwarven mage standing on a marble platform behind the golems screamed to his companions over the battlecries of the mad rush coming his way - and over the impact of Narg’s hellfire that was pounding the upper part of the tower.
Riven felt a little bit bad about all this. About what he was going to do. These people that’d been ‘subjugated’ or ‘conquered’ or ‘heavily coerced’ through Elysium’s stipulations, by cultists, for the event hadn’t asked to be here; but they were now subjected to the whims of whoever it was that’d completed this or that quest to achieve lordship. Even if temporary. Now they were stuck in a life and death situation that they really had no reason to be a part of, except for the fact that Elysium had deemed them and their societies to be stagnant. To be fodder for those who showed promise of growth to power. To be stepping stones for someone else’s path. Elysium truly was a bitch like that, but Riven couldn’t second guess himself now that all of Panu was on the line. If those apocalypse beasts were taken by the cultists, even a single one of them would be a living catastrophe. If Chalgathi in particular was taken by a cultist and his mother’s prophecy about Elysium buffing the creature to absurd tiers should he lose out was also true, then the entire planet was doomed should he fail.
Thus, he couldn’t fail. The people that were in his way were essentially dead men walking.
Nora’s swath of crazed horrors whooped and hollered at the forefront and rushed like rabid animals into the slaughterhouse. Defensive talismans shattered on both sides as powerful eruptions from different skills made ear-splitting booms and A long blade of red ice warped and protruded from the top of Riven’s staff, right from the center of the horned skull, as he spun the weapon around in a flourish.
Riven launched himself like a rocket into the tower’s base behind Nora’s flock. With an enormous burst of mana, he tore into the defenders with a flurry of razors bursting into the air around him and a spinning swing of his weapon.
Thus the butchery began.
***
It’d taken many hours to get to this point, but Justin’s tower was finally being overrun. Pockets of enemies were managing to break through as the defensive lines faltered or maneuvered to reposition. The ever-changing interior had helped stave off some of the frontrunners while diverting them to dead ends, but they were bound to make it to the throne room eventually. Fighting was ongoing in literally all parts of the tower as a few of the different panel sections for controlling the golems were brought offline and then back online multiple times now, though Justin still retained control of the majority with his best units concentrated in those areas.Justin bodychecked the first cultivator in his path and smashed his spiked mace into the second one like a battering ram, shattering the man’s thin blade along with his face before the body was sent spiraling backwards into the far wall.
Ducking a plasma rifle shot and literally smacking the other away with a metal-clad arm with speed that surpassed normal human physiology, he swung his fist into the entrance hall connected to the throne room that produced a wave of kinetic energy. Sheering power ripped across the floor and was blocked by some, but most of the invaders - including the alien that’d fired at him most recently - were eradicated in a violent spray of bone and viscera.
The golems were for all intents and purposes a never ending army of level 150 elites until those panel sections were simultaneously held by the enemy and shut down for good, so they just kept respawning. It’d even gotten to the point that Riven had commanded his demons to start staying behind to guard the panel sections, and even Nora ended up using her asylum of lunatics to hold four of the panels in turn, which Justin had a hard laugh at through the altar’s hologram map. The rabble of an army the vampire and his pets had brought with them were somewhat pathetic without the few prodigies present and represented in the non-cultist ranks, but then again Justin couldn’t really expect much else. Even his own army would have been rather useless if not for the golems, which by all accounts were besting many of the offensive force in one on one combat and when not overwhelmed by numbers. The draconic metal warriors were fierce and probably would have given Justin a run for his money back when he was about level 110 or so by his own estimate, so they weren’t anything to scoff at considering their levels.
Justin’s muscles flexed and he lunged forward in a flash, ducking under a thrown spear engulfed in light and stomping down to create a shockwave that preemptively softened the oncoming warriors coming out of the stairs and from beyond the turn in the large hall leading in. Metal ground against metal as he pumped his joints an shot forward like a cannonball to smash aside three more men, lethally stomp a downed healer woman in the gut, and then he roared with a pulse of molten metal that shot out from his body in all directions. The shards peppered his surroundings like a 360-shotgun blast and tore through dozens of people and the armor they wore at once before Justin slowed down.
Looking around at the dead and dying that his golems were cleaning up with halberds to quick gruesome ends, he scoffed and whipped his mace around to create a bloody pulp out of a downed nearby warrior who just wouldn’t stop crying about the wounds ripped into his chest.
“Pathetic. Truly.” Justin sneered and kicked the remnants of the corpse with enough force to send it rolling as he began walking back to his throne room. Blood hissed and burned along his metal exterior as his outer layer began to cool down from the molten magma into something more silvery, and his footsteps left smoldering, burning prints in their wake as he swung his mace over one shoulder with a long sigh. “This has been anything but exciting. When is he going to get here?”
Karma seemed to be listening in, because his counter-assassin wards all triggered within less than a second.
[You have been targeted with Mark of the Hunter (Blood). This is an offensive martial art. Details are partially obscured.]
[Stealthed hostile detected within your vicinity. Beware.]
[Stealthed hostile detected adjacent to your person. Beware.]
[Mark of the Hunter (Blood) has been triggered, you are frozen in fear for up to 2 seconds.]
[You have been struck with a critical hit via the martial art Backstab (Shadow). Max Damage x4.]
CRUNCH
Red wiry threads snapped into place all around the room as the golems around him shattered simultaneously by the dozens.
His soul felt like it’d imploded when whatever that mark was that’d latched onto him - but that didn’t compare to the strike immediately afterwards. Justin felt his spine snap from the impact as a long, black, razor sharp object ripped through the back of his neck - through the armor like it was nothing - and the critical kinetic energy still lingering in his neck was fraying the flesh of his vocal cords.
Stunned silence ensued as he continued to stare, until - from his left - a sinister feminine voice whispered into his ear: “And here I was expecting something of a fight… How sad.”
Out of the corner of his eye from where the demoness was leaning forward to do her whispering, Justin saw the infamous archdemon named Athela grinning from ear to ear. Her red eyes were wide with amusement over her black lips, and she slowly, playfully tapped a red katana against his metal forehead with a tut. “I was expecting-”
She didn’t get to finish that sentence when Justin’s arm whipped his huge mace around right into Athela’s body.
She was slightly surprised but managed to block with both katana’s, sparks scraping off the metals of the three weapons in lock - and she was even more surprised when her legs were swept with her arachnid limb still lodged in Justin’s neck. She tried to retract it to regain her balance but was locked in place by his body’s metal wrapping around the limb protruding from her back. Justin used this opportunity to turn his head, despite the pain, and savagely headbutted her in the forehead.
He heard her nose break and would have laughed if he had a throat to laugh with, but instead it just came out as a garbled muffling sound while the metal covering his skin acted to seal the wound shut and repair the bones and blood vessels. They were like nanobots, and he was frankly unkillable when he was-
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SNAP
Justin screamed in pain when the other five arachnid limbs skewered him and began to scramble his insides by moving around, searching for his vital organs and scraping along the beating metal heart inside his chest.
“THAT FUCKING HURTS!” Justin yelled when his vocal cords repaired, becoming enraged and using a sweeping gesture of his arms towards the ceiling above. “FORSAKE THE HEAVENS AND BRING ME FURY!”
The miracle flashed to life as demonic hieroglyphs lit up the center of a flaming pentagram high above. Out from the ceiling, a clawed, flaming hand of some long banished entity smashed into this realm and smashed into Athela ruthlessly.
Unfortunately for Justin he was still skewered and immediately adjacent to her, and that meant that he too was hit by the titanic strike while being smashed into the ground. An inferno leveled the entire throne room’s interior and sent a spiraling tornado of fire raging out around them. The floor cracked and tiny pieces of stone were sent skywards as the hand abruptly vanished, but the floor rapidly repaired itself despite being in the dead center of a fiery storm.
And the pain.
The wretched pain.
It was still there. The demoness was even laughing.
She was laughing.
At him.
“YOU’RE QUITE THE TOUGH ONE AREN’T YOU!?” She screamed over the raging blaze that burned her skin and hair, though she only seemed to be taking mild amounts of damage despite that attack being enough to wipe out entire mortal towns. “LET’S STEP IT UP THEN!”
Without warning her body exploded in size and began to morph, forcibly ripping her appendages out of the skewering holes they’d made only moments before as she grew. And grew.
And grew.
A flash of white caused the flaming tornado around them to freeze into ice, and as Justin coughed blood from the hole in his neck that was rapidly sealing itself shut with metal flakes - he lifted his head to behold a towering, building-sized white dryder with crystalline flowers and four red eyes. A crystalline icy maw dripping with some kind of frosty toxin splashed against the ground, and elemental lightning crackled between thousands of snowflakes drifting on a wind he could not feel through his thick armored skin.
She opened that maw of hers, which was big enough to swallow him whole, and she let out a scream as a beam of condensed elemental ice, elemental lightning, and sin energy wrapped itself together and blasted towards him.
He smashed his hands together. “Ironheart.”
His body surged in height and size, muscles exploding while his armor tripled in thickness. He took the blast head on, gritting his teeth under the destructive energy that was unlike anything he’d ever felt before. He let out a primal roar and with all the strength he could muster, swung upwards in a circular motion. “MOLTEN METAL SPLITS THE SKY!”
The image of a volcano erupted behind him and the ambient energy it produced reinforced his swing, sending out a mixture of kinetic energy, magma, and hellfire that ripped through the beam as a crescent vertical wave.
Athela snarled and swiped a slender hand down as her beam attack failed, producing a electrified blizzard in an instant that was so thick Justin couldn’t see through it properly. His crescent of magma was quickly deflated the more resistance it encountered, until only a smoldering husk made it through to slap harmlessly against Athela’s pristine bare torso.
The blizzard slowly dissipated, and Athela threw back her enormous head to violently belly-laugh with both her hands over her stomach. Seeing a gigantic man-eating dryder double over and curl up into a ball in comical laughter was not something Justin ever thought he’d get to see in his life, especially not at his own expense.
“It wasn’t THAT bad!” Just commented, feeling pathetic, and rubbing at his neck where the spine had to have been forcibly shoved back into place with the metal in and around his body. “You didn’t manage much better either!”
The irritation in his voice was obvious.
Athela, for her part, just laughed harder.
“I told you he was a tough one to kill!” A familiar nasally voice laughed from somewhere behind him, and Justin spared a backwards glance over his shoulder with eyebrows raised. His fist clenched when he saw who it was, and a low growl escaped his lips.
It was none other than Tao Zhang.
The creepy buffoon was still wearing his tin foil hat and those stupid crocs he loved so much, and a new teletubbie shirt he’d never seen before. But none of that fooled Justin. The man was absolutely evil, sadistic, and a calculating megamind genius if there’d ever been one to give a label to.
And he was standing next to none other than the number 1 ranker in the world: Riven Thane.
The cloaked vampire stood there with an amused grin on his face as his demoness, and famously enough - his girlfriend, Athela, rolled on the floor nearby. He picked at one of the flames frozen mid-air by Athela’s burst of elemental fae magic, examined the frozen product, then tossed it aside.
The axe-wielding muscular minotaur contracted to Tao was also present, Biggie-C or G or something like that, and so was the succubus Fay. The Panu world forums literally had enormous fan clubs dedicated to worshiping the succubus like some kind of sex icon given how beautiful she was, and up close - Justin couldn’t disagree. She was even prettier in person, though she looked rather bored at the moment.
“Hey Justin! Been a while!” Tao said with a stupid shit-eating grin as he scratched his ass.
Justin’s eyes narrowed behind his metal exterior. “Tao you sack of shit, are my eyes deceiving me? You’re betraying us!? For him!?”
“Oh don’t act like we were all in this together, you and everyone else were planning on killing me and everyone else in order to get the dragon and ascend. This is a free for all!” Tao shrugged his shoulders indifferently and rocked back on his heels. “This cultist stuff was fun and all until I realized that I probably wouldn’t win. There are just some seriously powerful people around and I didn’t want to die. So I gave my cards over to the winning team for a trade of sorts!”
Justin scowled. “A trade?”
“That’s what I said!”
“And what on Earth could have made you give up the dream of becoming a dragon rider like you’d oh so often preached about prior to integration’s offset? You were god damned obsessed with the idea of being an arch evil dragon-riding sorcerer that would conquer countries to acquire some kind of gay slave harem.”
Justin realized he’d hit a nerve with the gay slave harem comment, and Tao stuttered in fury as he clenched his fists and his face grew bright red.
“A NORMAL SLAVE HAREM, JUSTIN! NOT A GAY ONE! YOU KNOW I’M NOT GAY, I’VE TOLD YOU LIKE SEVEN TIMES!”
Riven raised an eyebrow and looked Tao up and down rather skeptically. “You know, there’s nothing wrong with being gay if that’s what you are. One of my best friends growing up was gay and he was hilariously good at being a wingman.”
“I’M NOT GAY!” Tao screeched, this time directing his ire at the vampire he stood next to. He pointed a sausage finger into the vampire’s face, holding it there only an inch out that made Justin curious about why Riven didn’t murder the guy right there given the vampire’s reputation. “Just ask pumpkin spice when we get back! SHE’LL TELL YOU!”
Riven blinked once. “Pumpkin spice? Do you mean Granny Beth?”
Tao looked flustered. “Yes that’s who!”
Justin just had to ask. “Granny Beth? Granny? You’re dating an old woman?”
“Super old. Very, very old.” Riven commented flatly, while Fay rolled her eyes very visibly in the background. “Anyways I’m here to talk about your surrender and servitude, should you change your ways. This offer will only come once, so think-”
“SHE’S NOT OLD! SHE’S A SMOKING BIG-BUTT HOTTIE AND YOU KNOW IT!” Tao screeched, obviously enraged.
Riven side eyed the huffing tin-foil hat wearing, croc sporting, teletubbie man and opened his mouth to reply, though better of what he was about to say, shook his head and dismissively waved his hand. “We are wasting time here. You, Justin. Look at me.”
Tao began huffing and heaving again, blubbering something about emerald succubus eyes when he was bitch-slapped by Riven across the face to outright silence him.
The vampire made sure Tao was keeping silent and that he didn’t need to smack the man again, getting a grin from the silently chortling minotaur on his left, and then resumed his conversation with the very confused and somewhat irritated Justin.
“People are dying needlessly. You can stop that by surrendering now, and talking out a deal with me.” Riven began, stepping forward as red frost began to creep up along the walls, ceiling, ground and already frozen flames all around the room while he approached. The very air around him seemed to want to bleed out and die, or that was the feeling Justin got by looking at the man as he approached.
It only made Justin more excited for the fight, and his hand tightened around his five-foot mace with an intense fervor burning in his heart. The unblinking, cold eyes of a man-eating predator. The absolute certainty in his ability. The lack of fear, and the dread when looking upon him. This man, Justin thought, was the embodiment of power.
Justin wanted that for himself.
Riven began talking again when he stopped ten feet from Justin’s standing spot and placed his left hand behind his back, while his right hand grasped the horned skull staff with flaming eye sockets and a river of blood snaking its way along the shaft. “You’ve proven yourself useful to have lived in that initial exchange with Athela. Just as Tao said, you’d be a useful asset to harness. Bend the knee now, follow me, and you will be rewarded handsomely. Otherwise you’ll just die with all the rest after I win this event, when I seek you out after the Chalgathi trials are over with. What say you?”
Justin was somewhat taken aback. When he registered what the vampire was saying. Work for Riven Thane? Why? Didn’t he already have a bunch of demons for that? They were on opposing sides in a world quest event, there was no way Riven actually thought Justin would fall for something like this. Did he?
He seriously considered taking off the altar’s limiter right then and there so that they could both go all out to see which of them was truly stronger. He wanted to put this cocky vampire in his place, but the calm demeanor of the warlock in front of him and the shifty shake of Tao’s head in the background clued Justin in that he probably shouldn’t just attack without talking about this first. Tao knew Justin too well by know and had known what Justin’s response would probably be, and though Tao wasn’t even close to what Justin would consider a friend… Perhaps there was some actual merit to what Riven was proposing.
The thought had never really crossed Justin’s mind, honestly enough. But now that the offer was on the table… he had to at least consider it.
Drawing up his mace into a ready stance, he stamped down his back foot and braced himself for a fight. “I want you to show me what you can really do first. If you manage to beat me handily, I’ll give it some serious thought. If you can’t absolutely outclass me in every way, then I still have a chance to win this thing and am still in the game for the long haul. Show me, vampire, that the videos on the Panu world forums aren’t all fluff. Show me that the rumors about you are true, or I’ll just kill you now and be one step closer to obtaining Chalgathi for myself.”
Riven’s eyebrows raised, and then a smile crept across his lips as he began to silently laugh - shoulders jumping slightly while closing his eyes. Eventually he opened them up again and stepped back - nodding to Justin a second later. “Tell your golems and soldiers to stand down then, to stop the needless killing, and we will begin. Then, fellow Earthling, I’ll give you a real taste of what you asked for. Just don’t complain about what happens next, because you literally asked for it.”