A/N: Sorry for the delay! I've been busy with trying to make amazon accept my book. Twice, it was cancelled and blocked, though now it is ready to be released on the 20th.
****Lightning rumbled far above, out of Lev’s sight. The sound, however, was loud enough to shake his very bones, rocking the armor and rattling his teeth.
He couldn’t spare it any attention, thoroughly entranced. The skies were awake and angry, roiling like tsunami waves. Flashes of turquoise, gray, and blue seeped through the clouds, illuminating the plains just as much as the suns would. The disastrous rainfall only added to the vista.
Moreover, the clouds themselves were a beautiful blue-ish gray, painting a scenery that he had only ever seen on the internet back on Earth. Even those paled in comparison.
But this was not Earth. Nor was the storm merely pretty. No, even as he watched, gigantic talons dripping blood poked out of the clouds, and he made the mistake of staring at them directly for an instant.
Then something stared back through the clouds.
That broke the spell faster and better than anything else could have. Lev didn’t dare look back as he flew back into the cave, grateful that he didn’t leave the entrance.
Heartbeat thundering in his ears, he glided deeper, reaching the bubble after a few minutes at his speed. Shadow mana kept his location concealed quite thoroughly, and he also didn’t notice any auras nearby.
That was a close call, he thought to himself and exhaled deeply, not forgetting to mute the sound with wards. Who knew how far that would spread?
Everyone inside his bubble was tense. They jumped when the construct’s wall suddenly parted, relaxing when Lev dropped his invisibility and made the bubble invisible instead.
“So?” the old man asked. “Is it what we think it is?”
“Yep.”
“… How was it?”
Lev held back a smirk at that. There was no doubt that, deep down, everyone was just as curious as him. He was merely an outlier, willing to risk it all to just look at the storm.
“Hmm, basically, the whole sky was covered with clouds. And not just small clouds or patches of clouds. No, these ones were wayyy higher than anything we see normally, and even then, they extended as far as I could see. There’s also constant lightning, and the color is different from the usual lightning we can produce. It’s instead turquoise. None of it was near the bottom of the clouds, though. I only saw some flashes and heard-”
Out of the corner of his eyes, he noticed a minor change in the surrounding stone. A slight blue sheen appeared on his bubble’s surface, almost unnoticeable in how faint it was. Even invisible, the barrier structure caught the light before enchantments dispersed it, though that was enough.
Lev’s head whipped back around, towards the path leading to the entrance. The cavern was big enough for a double-story house to crawl through, and yet, all of it was thoroughly illuminated by whatever was coming.
His breathing picked up. Beatrice noticed something was happening and didn’t hesitate to use the full power of her buffs on him immediately.
No sound, no hints of an aura, absolutely nothing beyond the increasingly brighter cavern. Light blue spilled out from a bend a few dozen meters away from the bubble’s resting place.
A drill slowly took form. Lev didn’t have time for treatments, so he improvised. The Epic disk strapped to the underside of the bubble was reshaped, its runes erased and changed.
Infusion for lightning was his best bet, partially because all the mana he was converting was divided two ways. Fire was funneled into an orb, one that had been treated in advance for rainy days.
Storing the lightning in his armor, he powered up all the last-ditch measures he had installed in his bubble. Two flamethrowers, treated to the extreme and enchanted to handle the strain of blue fire, aimed. They turned towards the approaching calamity soundlessly, turning brighter as fire was infused into them.
Below the bubble, the drill was enchanted to spin as fast as possible with a tip just as sharp. Runes to incorporate the blue element were also included, and so was Flameforged Constitution.
Combined with over a dozen supportive enchantments, it was the fastest Lev had ever enchanted a construct. And yet, he didn’t doubt for a single second that the result was Epic.
He just hoped it would be enough.
From the other side of the bend, a beak came into view. It was light blue, except also a color so dense that Lev’s brain immediately kicked into overdrive.
A barrier tendril scoured every bit of the bubble, storing everything that he couldn’t dismiss. The bubble itself shrank, and a rope wrapped around all the humans and brought them as close as possible.
Now the shape of a large pillar, the tip of the bubble was melded with a drill. Lev didn’t do anything hasty, wanting to confirm that he was actually in danger.
His doubts, however, only lasted till the monster’s face came into view. Just like the beak, it was comprised solely of solidified lightning, and in its maddened gaze, there was only a sadistic desire to toy with its prey, not a shred of sapience.
[Stormfury - ?????]
All of the converted mana was teleported to its destinations the moment Identify went off. His entire reserves of fire turned blue, and lightning was funneled into the drill as a large stream.
Unfortunately, the monster moved at the same time, and far faster than Lev.
A blue blur raced towards the bubble, only for the whole cavern to shake as two jets of blue flames tried to stop it. It barreled through that minor obstacle, beak wide open to take a bite out of the humans.
Just as he hoped.
An orb, brimming with a calamitous amount of fire, shot towards its throat. But the monster was way ahead of him, closing its beak and moving out of the way faster than Lev could see.
That was fine, though. When the orb erupted, it did so with all of his extreme class bonuses. A small sun bloomed in the cavern, and even if he didn’t expect it to even singe the monster, it bought them enough time for the drill to take them several meters below ground.
The flames were relentless, chasing the small tunnel the bubble was currently moving through, too fast for the drill. Lev formed barrier after barrier to keep his own explosion at bay, for the bubble was completely unenchanted after the rapid shrinking.
Fortunately, his barriers held. He formed more of them and enchanted them with the lone durability rune, dumping enough mana in each barrier sheet to improve their durability by 200%.
A loud shriek somehow reached the humans, even with the barriers blocking all airflow. They were already about four dozen meters underground when Lev felt the first barrier shatter.
Through the mental feedback, he could feel that it had been cleaved in three by the bird’s talons. But when the second, third, and fourth barriers shattered in quick succession, he knew an attack was coming.
More barriers formed. Uncaring of whether they would be useless, he filled the hole left behind by the drill with dozens of barriers. When the incoming attack easily destroyed another two dozen, he pulled out all of the stops.
His roughened willpower was ignored for now. It would only make everything harder. Lev consciously formed hundreds of barrier sheets, each of them only a hairbreadth apart from each other.
Advanced Barrier Carving was pushed to its limits, evolving in the process of carving hundreds of durability runes in a blink.
Ignoring the notifications, he instead grit his teeth and prepared Stargazer. Whatever was coming, it barreled through his overloaded preparations as if they didn’t even exist.
Even worse, he couldn’t feel a noticeable effect on its speed from all the collisions. It almost seemed to be getting faster as certain death approached.
When there were only a quarter of the barrier sheets remaining, he turned the flames in Stargazer’s blade blue before infusing it with lightning.
When he could see the lightning serpent’s face flying through the drill’s path, he almost panicked. The skill— and it was an active skill for sure— looked almost like a living monster.
In that brief instant before impact, he noted that Identify did not register it as a separate entity. That was all he could notice before he overloaded his armor.
His active skills, his passive skills, the armor’s enchantments, the absorbed kinetic energy from the rough drilling and high speed, and the lightning infusing the armor, all of it was utilized as best as he could manage for a single thrust.
Lev’s feet cracked the bubble’s floor, just barely bringing up Stargazer in the cramped space. Lightning was shaped into a Fracturing Wave, and since the skill had evolved twice, it was more malleable. He could use it without a full physical slash.
A mana slash tried to roar out of the blade. Lev didn’t let it escape until the last moment, combining its raw power with the blade’s physical edge.
The serpent clashed with Stargazer, and if the wielder hadn’t jumped up, the collision would’ve taken him through the bubble and launched him into the fully powered drill.
As it stood, his feet smashed into the bubble’s repaired floor, almost shattering it. His glaive trembled, struggling to keep the snake of solid lightning at bay.
It was lifeless; that much Lev could see. The skill was just so potent that the contest of strength didn’t even cause a hint of strain on its existence, and the serpent also packed enough mana to rival his own pools.
He couldn’t let it overpower him. Not for a second did he doubt that he couldn’t deal with the serpent, not when the monster behind it was also drilling a massive hole and slowly catching up.
They had to lose the skill somehow.
Scenarios ran through his head. All the likely futures in which he tried and failed, unable to stop the serpent from eviscerating the humans. Any counterattacks would roast the humans in the narrow space anyway, and it wasn’t like he had anything in his arsenal that could overpower the serpent.
Time seemed to slow down, not because of a passive skill. Their time was coming to an end. Stargazer’s blade was already riddled with cracks, the Fracturing Wave stored inside too strong not to be released properly. Only a quarter of it was actually outside the blade, clashing with the Stormfury’s skill.
Lev made a split-second decision. No matter how he looked at it, the situation was hopeless. The damned monster wasn’t even serious, or even trying. It had sent a casual skill their way, and from above, he could feel it observing his struggles in detail far more meticulous than what his Perception could accomplish.
With a sigh, his shoulders slumped slightly, still straining against the serpent. Stargazer’s enchantments, for the first time since he had obtained her, now shone with a light so bright he had to close his eyes.
Every drop of mana inside her was channeled into the runes. Lev also provided even more from his pool, elevating her power beyond what was intended.
The blade repaired itself, suddenly overcharged by positive effects from the enchantments. Sharpness increased manifold, and the Fracturing Wave inside was now housed easily. Hell, he could even fire a few more in tandem.
It was just a damn shame that he was going to lose a Superior weapon just to survive.
About to pour his all into one decisive strike, he only had an instant of warning when the small tunnel the drill was carving trembled.
The wall to his right exploded. Time slowed down exponentially this time, giving him just enough breathing room to transfer all the converted lightning inside Stargazer to the drill.
Instantly, the drill’s speed and destructiveness skyrocketed. He only had time to tie everyone’s feet to the bubble’s floor when the slowed moment drew to a close. Ten screams rang out in his ears as the humans plummeted, just barely dodging the newcomer’s gigantic maw.
From underneath, Lev observed the sheer bulk of the monster. It was made of brown stone, reminding him of a few particular monsters, though its size dwarfed all of them combined. Only the third-threshold Earthen Destroyers could compare, and even those didn’t stand a chance against this beast.
[Earthen Devourer - ????]
Another detail stood out in his Perception. The lightning serpent was… devoured. Exactly as the name implied. The new monster, which Lev could only compare to a blue whale except brown, had simply eaten the skill of a fourth-threshold monster.
Before he could even celebrate the momentary respite, the consequences arrived without warning.
The world slowed down, holding its breath. His skills faltered, the drill stopped spinning, his armor’s enchantments winked out, and even the Earthen Devourer froze in terror.
For a brief moment, Lev had forgotten just what they were dealing with. Fourth-threshold monsters were calamities that required all of the Exalted to band together. Even then, most of the publicly known battles hadn’t ended in draws— no, it had taken humanity’s combined strength to just drive them off, which was ultimately a loss. It was a testament to their insignificance in the grand scheme of things.
And now, one such calamity’s full aura was bearing down on them. It did not like the intruder ruining its playful hunting. It did not like that at all.
****
The Hunter stood amidst a small pond of blood. Corpses adorned its edges, each belonging to a monster almost as strong as them. For an hour, they had battled an Ant Queen and its four Royal Guards, and each had been a foe worthy of remembrance. And they would carry the memories, and also the mana claimed from their cores.
The stronghold still stands, the Hunter noted, the first sight that greeted them upon resurfacing. The battle had taken place far under the human-made structure, and their presence was one of the few things keeping it afloat.
No doubt, the Runic Warlord was aware of their presence and battles. That human was, ultimately, just better than them in every aspect. He was the living proof of humanity’s potential, one that was going to be fully realized by the Lord’s Favored.
Of course, the Hunter had discussed that at length with the human. The Runic Warlord was a man of many scars, each borne of a harrowing battle that the Hunter themselves could not have won.
Drakys had expressed his doubts about Lev on more than one occasion. The Exalted had full belief in the favored’s capabilities and ambition. That much was never in doubt. No, the Runic Warlord feared for the boy’s safety. The runebound human had talked about the world’s grudge against Lev multiple times, but the Hunter hadn’t been too worried.
Not at first, at least.
Now? They dove once again, effortlessly swimming through stone, detecting another champion ant making its way to the human fort.
How many of these pests can a hill possibly have? The Hunter wondered, having already killed thirteen of them. No matter. After this, the situation will stabilize, and I shall set off with the team of human Masters.
Halfway to the champion ant, the hunter halted, feeling their muscles tense and spasm from a dreadful presence far away. Their head snapped towards the Northwest, their mana reacting instinctually to a superior being.
And of course, that also came with the realization of why the Hunter had not seen Kassavin’s Favored for a while now.
****
Less than a minute later, Hakim put down the financial records he was double-checking with a long exhale. Extending a hand to the side, Chains of Freedom appeared in his waiting palm, not disturbing a single piece of furniture in his guildmaster’s office. Thousands of such summons had ingrained the right positioning in Hakim’s very being.
Squaring his shoulders, he did one final scan of Windkeep with his senses before activating a specific enchantment etched into the greatsword. In a blink, a mobile portal swallowed him up, depositing him in the middle of the lake present on Mount Tamara, where a silver pillar was already waiting for him under two bright suns.