Slev Richter- Hopes End
Slev looked down disdainfully into the pit of filth at the hunters he had hired. He knew they wouldn’t succeed, but he thought it would be a good way to garner information on the townsfolks’ threat reaction. Instead, Horus had shown how insecure he was and gotten himself beaten down by half a bar. The worst bit was almost no one used any real skills of note.
Tom The town librarian confirmed a mage, skilled with skill-countering magic. Torvald Glen, son of the guard captain, had obvious physical enhancements and gravity- or movement-related skills; Slev wasn’t sure which. Rafael the innkeeper's power was concerning; mind-affecting powers were rare, especially those that could directly command people. Gregory, he still hadn’t seen enough either telekinesis or metal control; based on his class name and use of weapons, he assumed the latter.
Slev was pulled from his musings and enjoying the hunters' struggles below as a bright, nearly white thread of light snapped into place above the eastern wall, illuminating the land leading from the wall to the forest brighter than even daylight would. He stared at the thick thread of pure magic a hundred strides long, seemingly just hanging in space.
“Alright, solid light magic, I’ll add it to the list.” He sighed deeply and began making his way towards the disturbance to the east. He had only been here an evening, and so far his assessment was that this town was full of the criminally insane, and coming from Slev, that was one hell of a statement. The casual, disrespectful ease with which they dealt with The bounty hunters, not to mention the weirdly unified front they showed, were not a good sign for the crusade.
Vraxious- Hopes End
Vrax squinted against the bright light from the top of the short wooden wall surrounding Hope’s End; no matter how many times he saw it, he couldn’t get used to Charles’s magic. He glanced towards Charles, a weathered elderly man who looked more like a goblin now than anything else, leaning heavily against a cane. Charles's face was a staggering contrast to the rest of his ancient, pruned appearance; his eyes were alight with pure white energy, and wisps of the same magic escaped his lips around his demented smile.
The forest in the distance shuddered slightly as something impacted a tree hard enough to knock it off kilter with a grand snap. The willows roiled as the panicked monsters stampeded through them, half stumbling to a stop in the field, dazed by the binding light shining down. They were six-legged lizards with shaggy coats of purple trailing down their long, thick bodies, ending in large rainbow-hued poofs of fur on the end of their tails. One savaged a nearby tree with four of its limbs, the bladelike claws vibrating so fast it simply brushed the tree apart, before a blast of sonic energy tore the ground around it open in its confusion.
Vrax whistled quietly as their very steps noticeably shook the ground; they were between the size of a horse and the size of a small cottage in the case of the alpha, who trailed the rear, massive horns whipping back and forth, clearing a chunk of willows from existence. Vrax identified a few members of the pack. [Shardwave Drake Tier-1](Lvl26) most were in their low to mid twenties, with the alpha being solidly level fifty-one.
Feldwin spoke loud enough for the two dozen people on the wall to hear. “I think we should let our new celebrity go first!” He slapped Vrax on the back, pointing to a nearby cluster of three drakes that had wandered farther from the herd than the rest.
Vrax had sobered up some with the timely application of a rather unpleasant potion. “Uhhh...I don’t think you guys really want me to do that….My stuff is better suited to out of town….” Jeers interrupted him.
“Oh, ho, are we scared of some little lizards?” Feldwin joked firing an arrow with enough force to strip bark from the wall; it sent one of the most distant drakes into a tumble as its leg was nearly severed.
Hans, of all people, spoke up. ” Uhhh..ta laddie is trying ta save us from the nighmares…”
That drew some confused looks from the townsfolk. Vrax sighed, “Fuck it, you all will have to deal with this eventually. Everyone that doesn’t have a bracelet, put one on right now.” Most of the bar goers already had one, but Torvald handed a few more adapted marks out from his bag.
Vrax lightly hopped from the wall, tucking into a roll as he summoned his armor and began approaching the pack of three Shardwave drakes. Two were the size of a warhorse; the third was closer to that of a cart. The ground around them was a tumultuous mess of random explosions as their magic ran loose around them.
Vrax looked back towards the wall. “Don’t kill the horrifying critters! Those are mine!” There were some confused mumbles on the wall; a few of the other low-tier fighters had hopped down or were readying spells aimed for other small groups of monsters.
Feldwin started shouting something snarky that trailed off as the ground in a vast circle around Vrax blackened, bubbling with rot. Dutchess practically erupted upwards from the rot like a nightmare being born from the shadows. She threw her maw back with an inhuman crooning noise; her tongues reached strides into the air as her skin drank the light from above, fueling the symbols across her body and darkening the clearing even further. She swung her head around in a slow, predatory sweep, seeming to pause on Feldwin for a moment too long before she began circling around to flank the drakes.
She stopped suddenly, looking back at the shocked faces on the wall. A voice she had used once before, the dark voice of a man far beyond reason and the petty concerns of morality, shook the clearing. “One more soul for the pyre, one more soul for the legion, and one more soul. Just. For. Me.”
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The townsfolk on the wall began an excited, slightly concerned clamor.
“Is that a fucking dragon?” One man exclaimed,
“That’s what dragons have bad dreams about, sweet seven hells…” Another responded while making a superstitious gesture across his brow.
“Uhh...what’s everyone talking about?” a confused voice from the end asked.
“What the hell did it just say? Did Vrax summon a fucking demon?” Elric asked in concern, still holding half his beard in a free hand.
“Wait, he’s a paladin, right? Did anyone bother to ask for what god? Because that doesn’t look like a goddamn angel to me. Not that im complaining, just would have been nice to have expectations set more realistically,” the short fat man with the burning staff said while impatiently waiting his turn.
“Oh shit, he just brought Duchess straight out; didn’t expect that,” Torvald huffed in mild surprise.
Feldwin looked at Torvald, his eyebrows so high they looked like they were trying to escape his face. “He named that fucking thing Dutchess?”
“Dutchess Phobos, first of her name… technically,” Torvald replied before hopping off the wall himself.
“If that idiot survives to the second tier, we are all going to die to something named Princess or something equally stupid,” Feldwin grumbled while drawing his bow back for another shot.
Vrax’s heart thundered as he sprinted forward, the gliders sailing on either side of him. The glider’s magic, in the form of a two-legged predator, seized the first drake with its teeth, ripping it to the ground. Vrax leapt over a wave of shredding energy that shuddered towards him, ripping the ground apart, his spear thrust out, catching the downed beast in the chest. His smite pulsed into its chest, carving a wicked X mark through its flesh, liquefying its thick sheets of muscle, and exposing the bone beneath.
The gliders continued to hold the beast down in the jaws of a massive shadowy predator. The drake's tail sailed towards Vrax; in desperation, he ducked under it but caught a blast of vibrations from it. The ground around him exploded outwards; his armor brutally consumed the surroundings, wrapping him in a green haze of protective energy, then the haze shattered the tail end of the blast, rattling his bones and almost certainly tearing muscles loose from bone beneath his armor.
Oh, fuck me, that's strong. Vrax painfully stepped in intimately close to the thrashing monster, within hands reach of its eye, and activated his ever-thirst cape. It sprung forward like a starving beast, its roots delving into the drake's eyes and nose. Vrax quickly unclipped his cape, leaving it to feast on the struggling drake, and dodged past its flailing talons towards the next drake. He dragged the spear along; it was shaped like a curved claw to dip deep and siphon life from it. Vrax could feel ligaments mend and muscles squirm back into place beneath his flesh.
The Drake ahead focused its narrow eyes on him as he approached with malicious intent; mana flowed into an arrow-shaped ram in front of the beast's narrow skull, formed from pure-shaped sound. It thrashed its head in challenge, shredding the grass and ground the ram touched. Oh fuck, nope… Vrax aborted his charge, jogging wide just in time to see the duchess clamber from the grass beside the drake.
Duchess ignited the luminescence all across her body in a strobe of shifty bloody reds, her claws sunk into the earth as she whipped her tail with a vicious snap, sinking one blade into each side of the drake's neck behind the head. She leveraged her weight down, pushing the beast's ram into the earth in a great gout of blood and soil. Then, while still holding it down by the neck, she pounced, sinking her claws in deep behind the skull, tongues flickering about madly.
The excited cheers on the wall slowly died down as the drake duchess was fighting began to scream; it was a hollow, terrified thing, the moans of something that already knew it was dead and simply wished for the blessed end to come faster. Dutchess didn’t oblige, sinking her claws in and ever so slowly ripping the drake’s skull from its body while her tail dissected the thick strands of muscle holding the head to the torso one by one. With a final heave, she raised the skull and half the spine above herself in victory.
That same joyfully evil voice shared its darkness with Hope end, once more whispered from her as she began slowly sliding the spine into her gullet, “Share the bounty of the darkness with me.”
It was so quiet on the battlements of the wall you could hear a pin drop over the distant din of battle. Feldwin was the first to say something to the shocked onlookers about the carnage. Vrax was unleashing as he moved on to the final drake. “Sooo…the new betting pool is if he dies or ends up as some new dark lord?” Fresh chapters posted on n͟o͟v͟e͟l͟f͟i͟r͟e͟.net
Elric looked towards Feldwin, his mouth half open in shock. “I think we should have a pool for eaten by his own monsters too...”
Slev Richter - Hopes End
Slev was sitting cross-legged at the base of a tree watching—well, he wasn’t sure what. He had set aside his notepad in frustration about a minute into the fight and now was simply rubbing his forehead in concern as the obvious tier three class holders on the wall were having a dick measuring contest.
Slev was one of the few people he knew of that had witnessed grand-scale war magic, the kind of thing that happened when border skirmishes increasedand kingdoms pulled resources from their bastions of power. The earth shattered, skies burned, and the very air could melt magical steel. That was what this looked like, except it was being used against two Tier-2 Ents that had really fucked up by coming into this field.
The second of the high-tier fighters began his assault; a balding clerk was what the man looked like: stubby legs, round belly, simple clothes, and cheap glasses. The staff he was holding, however, was so powerful that even Slev’s advanced identity couldn’t make heads or tails of it, not to mention the man’s actual class and level. He wove the staff in the air around him in a mystifyingly beautiful display of exact angles and sharp bursts of mana. The air around him hazed like a mirage for a moment, and then nothing.
Slev leaned forward, squinting to see what had gone wrong. “The hell did he miscast?” There was a solid three seconds before one of the towering Ents froze in place, impossibly complex sigils lighting a fiery orange across its bark. Then Fire vomited from its mouth, gutting the creature from the inside out as a fireball bloomed from inside the beast, using its own essence as fuel, incinerating most of the grass in the field, turning the nearby ground to a shimmering glass, and even setting part of the town walls slightly ablaze.
Slev picked up his notebook with shaky hands and started furiously scribbling. The inquisitor had tasked him with dealing mostly with the paladin, so he would start there. The man appeared to be a dark god worshiper granted the power to summon demons. Imps In the shape of squirrels almost certainly, and that thing of fear and shadow—he hadn’t even been able to get a good look at it through the abyssal scrawl carved across its flesh. But if he had to guess, it was an Incarnate. Something Slev would even hesitate to summon; the cost in lives and blood to keep one of those on this plane of existence was…a logistical difficulty.