Tier 3+ - Accidental Champion (Book 2) - Chapter 63 - Zombie Goblin (Patreon)

Killing these goblins felt like the easiest thing in the Greater Universe, to the point where it was difficult to test his new abilities on them.

His Soul Shatter spell, which caused a burst of soul damage against an enemy, harnessing their own soul, had two paths: area-of-effect damage, or single-target damage. As it was still only Rank 1, he could use either path.

When he cast it for the first time he used it as an area-of-effect spell. It cleared the entire first floor of the keep. All one hundred goblins died in an instant.

Xavier had stepped into the room and cast it on the nearest goblin. Shards of what looked to be glass shot out from it in every direction. The glass wasn’t corporeal—he could tell that much—and it didn’t harm his party members. It tore through every other goblin in the large room, leaving their bodies untouched in that same eerie way that Soul Strike did.

“Well,” Howard muttered, poking his head into the room from the doorway to the stairwell. “That was effective.”

Xavier frowned. “Yes. It was.” He stepped over the first few corpses, panning his vision about the room, then shook his head and sighed. “A little… too effective.” He rubbed the back of his neck, contemplating his next move.

The Upgrade Quest came up instantly.

Soul Shatter – Rank 1

Upgrade Quest:

As you have now used this spell, you have begun your first step on the path to upgrading it to Rank 2.

Available paths:

Soul Shatter (area-of-effect) – Shatter an enemy’s soul to detonate it and inflict soul damage to the target and nearby enemies. To upgrade, kill 200 enemies with Soul Shatter’s area-of-effect path. Progress: 100/200

Soul Shatter (single-target) – Shatter an enemy’s soul to detonate it and inflict soul damage to the enemy. To upgrade, kill 50 enemies with Soul Shatter’s single-target path. Progress: 0/50

This spell is bound to your Otherworldly Reaper class. Gaining Rank 2 in this spell will not require you to forget another spell, and this spell cannot be forgotten while you remain in the Reaper line of classes.

One cannot walk backward on the path.

Good thing the spell requires two hundred kills for the area-of-effect path, otherwise I might have upgraded it by accident my first time using it…

Xavier, on reflex, harvested the souls of all the dead enemies around him. All but one—the soul he’d just shattered. That, he couldn’t even detect anymore.

Justin stepped into the room, frowning. “What do you mean it was tooeffective? Are you really complaining about the fact that you took out the entire room with one spell?”

“Honestly, some people will just find anything to complain about,” Siobhan said, the hint of a smirk playing on her lips.

“It makes it difficult to judge a spell’s effectiveness if I can just…” Xavier snapped his fingers. “Kill everything with it. I’d need to fight stronger enemies to know which path is best.”

“Area-of-effect or single-target?” Siobhan asked.

Xavier nodded. “I see the advantages of both.” He sighed. “I think I’m leaning toward area-of-effect.” He tilted his head to the side. “I think Soul Strike will always be my most effective weapon, and if I were facing a single strong enemy with many weaker enemies around it… I could target the strong enemy with Soul Shatter…”

“Which would then kill the enemies around it,” Howard replied, “letting you harvest their souls, and still damage the enemy in front of you. Then, you could use Soul Strike primarily on one enemy.”

“Exactly. I also think I’ll be facing more armies than single strong enemies. At least in the near future.”

“And those single strong enemies you do face certainly won’t be D Grade,” Howard said. “At least, not for a little while.”

“We hope,” Justin muttered.

Siobhan walked to the centre of the room, her purple robes trailing just above the ground as she stopped over the pristine goblin corpses. “It does soundlike the best way to go, but maybe you should hold of deciding the path until you’ve tested your other new spells. You’ll have better information then.”

“Good idea.” Xavier had been thinking of doing the same thing. While fighting the Endless Horde, he’d lacked the chance to take much time to make decisions on spells. He’d needed advantages as fast as possible. The shift from that to know was something to get used to.

He looked over at the stairs. “One floor down.” He pushed forward. The others had cleared this floor twelve times the day before, getting faster and faster at it each time they went through. Not only because they grew stronger, but because their tactics improved. Which also meant Xavier knew every inch of this place—except for the final floor. He hadn’t set foot up there yet.

The next spell he tried out was Core Burn.

He jogged up the stairs, taking four at a time, and reached the next room. When he stepped over the threshold the goblins let out little shouts and ran straight at him. Their swords and axes and spears slashed, chopped, and thrust into his robes and did… nothing.

“That tickles,” he muttered. The smarter of the goblins realised their attacks were completely useless and began running away in wide-eyed terror.

Xavier cast Core Burn on one of the goblins that had remained behind. Instantly, its aura… exploded. It flared, brighter than anything of its level should have been able to. The little green beast stumbled backward, clutching its chest. Then the bright light was gone. Core Burn caused a chain reaction, eating at the goblin’s health next.

Within seconds, it was dead.

Core Burn has taken a step forward on the path!

Core Burn is now a Rank 2 spell.

…

Core Burn is now a Rank 3 spell.

One cannot walk backward on the path.

Well, at least it’s easy to rank up. At the moment.

The test didn’t really tell him much, however. Honestly, he was glad the spell only had a single path. One less decision for him to make right now.

It seems there’s a downside to being overpowered while testing new spells. These enemies are simply too weak for me to experiment on.

Xavier tilted his head at the goblin’s corpse. The goblin, like the goblins on the floor below, looked as though it was unharmed. He could see the soul within the goblin, ready to be harvested. Instead of harvesting it, however, he cast Soul Puppet.

The goblin rose to its feet. Its movement was stilted. Eerie. As though it were a marionette.

A puppet indeed.

The spell gained an instant rank-up the moment he used it. Though unlike Core Burn, it only gained one rank.

The goblin just… stood there. Despite the spell’s description, it certainly looked like a zombie. The spark inside its brain was gone—whatever spark a goblin had—and all that was left was its soul. A soul that Xavier commanded.

Xavier had become accustomed to controlling enemies with Willpower Infusion by using mental commands, so he did same for Soul Puppet, sending it an instruction to run and attack the other goblins, who were huddled at the stairwell leading to the next floor. For whatever reason, though they were afraid of him, they hadn’t gone upstairs.

The goblin snapped into action. Its head wrenched to the side, awkwardly turning before its body. Then it pivoted on the ball of its left foot and spun. It held a short sword in one hand and a shield in the other, but its arms were dangling by its side as though they had no bones in them.

Guard up.

The goblin raised its sword and shield, though it didn’t look… quite right. Then it sprinted at the other goblins.

Siobhan came to stand next to him. She crossed her arms and raised her eyebrows. “Soul Puppet?”

Xavier nodded. “Soul Puppet.”

“Looks a bit…” She tilted her head to the side, her face scrunched up in what she’d call stink-face if Xavier were doing it. “Um…”

“Weird?”

“I would have used the word stupid. But yeah, weird works too.”

The other goblins seemed wary of the dead goblin running at them, something Xavier didn’t blame them for. Though the little green beasties were true to form, just as cowardly as he remembered they were back when he’d first encountered them at his university.

So far, he was wondering what the advantage of a Soul Puppet was. The spell’s cooldown had been fast enough—maybe five seconds. He supposed that was because his Spirit attribute was so damned high.

I guess the advantage is that I could make a whole damned army of the little bastards.

If the situation were different, he might wish to stand there and raise goblin after goblin until he had an overwhelming force. Each kill would grant him a new soldier.

I wonder how long they last if they aren’t attacked. Seconds? Minutes? Hours? And how much of that is based on the strength of the soul that I use?

Xavier watched with great interest as the zombie goblin attacked the first goblin it reached. Its moves were jerky and strange. It attacked its enemy not just with its sword, but with its shield as well, as though trying to bash it to death. Not very sophisticated. It certainly didn’t look like it was being controlled by a soul—nothing like how his soul apparitions attacked.

Maybe the soul has difficulty controlling a corporeal body?

The enemy goblin blocked a strike and counterattacked, slashing a wound into the zombie goblin’s shoulder.

The zombie goblin was unperturbed. Didn’t look hurt in the slightest. Its blood was no longer flowing, as its heart no longer pumped, so it barely bled from the wound.

It overpowered the other goblin. Not from skill, just by the very fact that it couldn’t be harmed, only immobilised, and the enemy mustn’t be used to fighting in such a way.

It didn’t take long for the other nearby goblins to surge in and help. In moments, the zombie goblin had both its arms lopped off.

Its head followed soon after.

“It didn’t do toobadly,” Justin said. “The spell’s a bit creepy though. Can you imagine an army of those things?”

Xavier grinned, a little sinisterly. “Yes. I can.”

He gripped Charon’s Scythe and activated its imbued ability, Soul Step, using it on the recently deceased goblin—not the zombie goblin, that soul had deteriorated too much to be viable. Which meant he couldn’t simply send his soul puppets wherever he wished then Soul Step to their location, using them as mobile teleportation platforms.

There goes that idea.

The world shiftedaround him. One moment he was standing by the doorway, Siobhan at his right, Justin at his left, and Howard behind him. The next he was standing directly in front of the goblin his zombie had just slain, surrounded by other goblins.

Effective. I wonder if I can control which way I face next time?

Soul Step has a cooldown of 1 minute. It cannot be used for another 59 seconds.

He was disorientated, but only for a moment. He supposed he would get better at that the more he did it. It was a shame the imbued ability took a whole minute to refresh. As it wasn’t a spell, he doubted he’d be able to reduce the cooldown on it.

Xavier couldn’t help himself. He whirled around in a great sweeping strike with his brand-new scythe-staff. The blade sliced through the heads of six goblins with ease. The orientation of the blade, no longer at an angle against the haft, made the strike much more effective than his last weapon.

The heads thudded to the ground just before the bodies of their owners followed.

I could definitely get used to this.

The rest of the goblins on the second floor of the goblin keep, seeing no way out—as they presumably didn’t want to head up the stairs to the next floor—came after him. He harvested the souls of those he’d slain and waited for the first goblin to reach him. Its axe slashed for his neck.

Xavier activated Otherworld Phase, the imbued connected to his Anointed Robes of Umbral.

The axeblade went straight through his neck, as though he were nothing but a ghost. The goblin’s eyes widened in confusion. Xavier used Core Burn on the goblin, if for nothing more than to gain another rank.

Core Burn has taken a step forward on the path!

Core Burn is now a Rank 4 spell.

One cannot walk backward on the path.

He smiled.

Very good.

Soul Step and Otherworld Phase worked exactly how he’d expected them to. Though as he’d used them, he’d noticed something that hadn’t been a part of their descriptions. An energy from within Charon’s Scythe, then from within the Anointed Robes of Umbral, had been drained.

The items have their own Spirit Energy reserves…

Only a small portion of the energy in his equipment had been drained, but he funnelled some more into them all the same. He got the feeling that wasn’t something that would happen naturally, that he would need to remember to constantly refresh their reserves, lest he be unable to use one of his imbued abilities.

Speaking of…

At least a dozen goblins were surrounding him now, and so he used his final imbued ability, the one connected to his Dark Steel Bracer.

Buffer!

The goblins were rapidly pushed backward by an invisible force, as though he were gripping each one of them with Heavy Telekinesis. They slid across the ground until they were twenty feet away from him in a circle, where they abruptly halted.

This could definitely come in handy too.

Xavier smiled, impressed with the spells and abilities he’d acquired since defeating the Lord of the Endless Horde. They would definitely add a level of versatility that he’d been lacking.

But he still had two more spells to try.