Chapter 83 (Patreon)

Chapter 83

Allie’s eyes went wide when the demoness lunged for her and quickly erupted with power, encompassing the area around her and demolishing the rooftop she stood on to blast the creature backwards.  However the demon was far faster than Allie had anticipated, and it used strings of red webbing to adjust her trajectory and avoid the blast entirely before catapulting underneath the roaring death mana to clip Allie’s right leg with one of her elongated arachnoid blades.

Crimson liquid flew through the air and a searing pain ached through Allie’s calf, but the majority of the blow was blocked by her bone armor that covered her shins.  Only a small area of unarmored flesh was truly hit, but her body quivered in recognition as a venom began seeping into her body from the wound.

She’d been poisoned?  With such a glancing blow?

Though that poison quickly disappeared due to her vampiric blood, which nullified most toxins almost immediately.

Half of Allie’s bone minions rushed ahead, spreading out to avoid spinning discs of crimson blades while the other half exploded and flew skywards.  Allie whirled and slammed a foot into the demoness who spun backwards under the blow – surprised herself at Allie’s own speed before redirecting her attack using numerous shards of red webbing.

But Allie jumped off the devastated building to avoid the flurry of small needles, cursing under her breath while her heartbeat picked up to levels of simultaneous anxiety and excitement that she hadn’t felt in quite some time now.  Bones flew through the air from the minions she’d sacrificed and collided with her body fifty feet off the floors crumbling below her, forming a monument of bone armor around her with protective ivory layers and spikes.

First came the legs, then the torso, then the arms and helmet – almost doubling her normal size and making her look like a linebacker.  She was somewhat slower in this form, but her defenses skyrocketed when green runes began glowing along the newly constructed bone armor.  Layered barriers of death mana also radiated out from her construct, rebuffing the slashing and projectile attacks of the infuriated demon that screamed in rage Allie’s way.

“You little bitch!” Athela screeched, her black tongue whipping forward like a lightning strike and bouncing off the flaring black and teal bubble surrounding Allie.  But the bubble did shimmer, and Allie had to pour more mana into it in order to keep it intact from another crazed flurry of strikes.

Allie then summoned her obelisk – a towering ghostly visage that bloomed over the battlefield and began empowering her, while simultaneously weakening…

She stopped dead when she realized that although the humans she’d originally been tracking were quickly weakening under the aura effect of her obelisk, the unholy caster’s attacks were seemingly empowered.  The red flurry of discs continued to come, cutting down her hoard of skeletons with more and more power behind the attacks.  And when she identified him, she was both startled and confused with the result.

[Vampire]

That’s all she got.  Well no wonder the obelisk wasn’t weakening him, it was very likely they were both being empowered by the obelisk – not just her.

But why would a vampire be protecting humans?

She had so many questions.  She was somewhat excited to meet another of her kind. He probably knew the secrets of her race that she’d been so clueless about since unearthing her old heritage, but she was also mid-battle with him and he obviously had a motive to defend the people below.  Again, that posed the question – why?  These people were hunting her and all the other undead down in this area, they’d even spawned a system quest in this city to slay all the local undead through that damnable holy book Prophet had found.

She didn’t have time to dwell on it for too long though, and kicked off the building to launch herself towards the street while avoiding two more blurring blood lances that shredded her barrier and nearly ripped her left arm off.  She could feel the power behind those strikes, and they’d left her barriers absolutely decimated.

Quickly dismissing the bone armor after realizing speed would be more valuable than defense in this fight, her bone armor shredded itself and flew forward in a hail of bone shrapnel that took the enemy caster by surprise.

A wall of crimson ice flew up in front of him in an instant, catching the bone fragments to completely block the blow while Allie flipped up into the air to avoid another slash at her back from the demon.

What an irritatingly fast minion to deal with.  Allie was used to being the fastest one in any given fight, but this creature was even faster than she was – if only barely.

Cursing and turning her wand on the arachnid-humanoid hybrid, Allie launched a blast of black power from her weapon.  The wand screeched and howled during its strike, briefly paralyzing the demon mid-lunge and giving Allie’s attack just enough time to connect.

*BOOM*

Athela’s right breast and arm were ripped off entirely, but Allie’s mind raced with panic when she realized the grinning demon just shrugged off the momentum of the blow meant to send her backwards by turning her body sideways.  Instead she used that momentum to spin and kept coming forward like a tornado of blades and claws.

Allie screamed when a flurry of attacks hit her all at once – most of them glancing off the soul-woven bone armor she wore but many of them landing on weak spots where her armor didn’t cover.  She had to act quickly, and in turn she mentally grasped at a nearby skeleton to fling it at the demon.

The skeleton cracked and reformed, rapidly morphing into a spear of ivory and impaling the demon through the left thigh.  The demon screeched when the spear ripped through her leg, and she was launched across the parking lot.

One of Allie’s minions crashed into her, knocking her out of the way of a blast of black lightning that scorched the ground and ripped up cement where she’d been only a moment before.  She sneered, her wounds quickly healing under the dark night sky and her red eyes glistening behind her bone mask.

In front of her about twenty yards away, dozens of spinning red blades appeared amidst a swirling vortex of red ice.  An aura of malice, almost physical in nature radiated out from the enemy vampire and caused her to stagger under its weight – his brilliant crimson eyes glowing with power while his staff of flesh and wood crackled with black lightning.

How did he have such a palpable aura this early after the system set in?  Did he have background knowledge on the inner system workings before the worlds merged?

She needed to either finish him or subdue him before the others got back into the fight.  She could see the humans were positioning themselves to attack at her back, and the demon was yanking the bone spear she’d impaled it with while cursing loudly in an infernal language Allie didn’t recognize.  Most of her skeletons were out for the count, though she still had about two dozen of them left.

She sent her remaining skeletons after the humans to buy her time and decided on the demon first.  To the other vampire’s surprise, she vaulted left and ignored the caster – going straight for the demon to finish it off instead.  Three flaming skulls came into being, encircling Allie before she fired them off with another sonic boom as they broke the sound barrier again.

The target hit true and the demon’s shocked expression was locked onto Athela’s face right before she was sent crashing into the parking lot again, creating a crater that left her body mangled and twitching.

But the decision to focus the downed minion also cost Allie.  To her right, the other vampire’s power built and exploded.  Crimson ice immediately blasted across the cement, covering the parking lot and hundreds of red spikes climbed up from the frozen grounds to shoot Allie’s way.  Black lightning burst from the staff with imbued shadow energy.  Dozens of homing blades sliced through the air and matched her trajectory despite her attempt to dodge, and over half of them made impact.

The blinding pain Allie felt after that was… immense.

Her bones broke and shattered, the black cloth armor she wore was absolutely shredded, and without her vampiric healing and endurance or the soul-woven equipment she wore – well, she’d be dead.

Allie’s body crashed through a burning apartment wall and out the other side.  Her body skipped across the ground like a stone on a lake, crunching and breaking with each impact until she came to an abrupt stop against a car.  The car’s metal bent under the impact and skidded across the ground for a dozen yards with Allie wedged into it.

Nevertheless she got up, pulling herself out of the twisted metal with a groan and cracking her neck as she felt her bones and muscles reconfiguring themselves under the massive amount of regeneration her body produced.

She grimaced.  “Fuck that hurt…  Looks like I’m going to have to get serious.”

***

Riven cast a worried glance Athela’s way and rushed over after sending the enemy necromancer blasting through the apartment complex.  He didn’t get any XP notification so he was sure she wasn’t dead, and when he reached Athela he could only grimace.  Athela was still alive, but her body was absolutely wrecked.  Her jaw hung off by threads of flesh and she looked like she was in severe pain.

He bent down to one knee, putting a hand on Athela’s cheek and pushed the bloodied, matted hair out of her eyes.  “You did well.  Go home, I’ll call you back after it’s done.  And don’t worry, I’ll summon Atharost if things get bad enough.”

Without another word he banished her back to the nether realms before she bled out.  Hopefully that’d be enough to heal her wounds, and he was pretty certain it would be.  But he was without help now, facing down an opponent that was far beyond anything else he’d faced so far.  She even surpassed the satyr warlord he’d slain in Dungeon Negrada, but at the same time - he’d also gained significantly in terms of power since then.

He was not the same man as he had been back in the hellscape.

*CRACK*

The sky overhead broke apart, almost literally, as another realm presented itself before Riven’s very eyes.  It was only for a brief moment that the enemy caster held this spell intact, but that was more than enough to cause Riven’s jaw to drop.

Out from rifts in the void, an enormous black and teal eyeball wreathed in death mana focused on his position.  The rift wasn’t entirely complete, nor was it able to last more than a second, but that gaze from some other world bore down on him with all the weight of a malicious god.

His body shattered and the ground cracked and splintered - erupting all around him in a split second for dozens of yards around him.  His clothes were left in tatters.  He felt his skull, ribs, arms and legs all break at the same moment, and internal organs ripped apart in sprays of viscera that left him reeling in pain while he screamed.

Out of the burning wreckage between two collapsing buildings, Allie’s figure walked through the smoke.  She limped slightly, her red eyes glaring at the man who’d managed to push her this far, and she breathed heavily after exerting so much force.

On her way forward she stumbled twice, but picked herself up and became more sure-footed as her regeneration continued to heal her broken figure.  She stopped twenty yards away from the other vampire, heaving and taking a hesitant step back when Riven pulled himself from the wreckage of the shattered cement.

She saw an arm snap back into place, the torn flesh rapidly mending itself to the naked eye while muscle regenerated at astonishing levels.  His lacerated right foot quickly grew back bones, new pale skin covering his body just as quickly as her own did.  He too was obviously injured though, and the two siblings stared one another down.

It was only when Riven coughed up blood and removed his mask to let the fluids drain that Allie’s eyes opened wide in astonishment - and in that second, all the fight left her body instantaneously.  Her right hand dropped the wand she’d been holding, and she took an involuntary step forward while Riven eyed her and began to conjure new blades.

“... Riven?”  Her voice quivered when she spoke, and her body visibly began to shake while her arms wrapped around her shoulders in an attempt to contain her roiling emotions.

Riven abruptly stopped the formation of his spells, recognizing that voice just as fast as she’d recognized his features.  His sneer of defiance became a shocked look of panic, then dismay, and then confusion.  Then he looked horrified after realizing what they'd almost done.

“Allie?  Fuck, Allie is that you?”