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Even as he backpedaled away from the Plague Lord’s renewed assault, Alex flipped his identification, knowing that John would be checking it almost constantly both because that was the plan, and the low-level buzz he felt from the attribute told him that the plan was being followed.
Help-Them This’ll-Take-Some-Time
Longer messages didn’t really translate through well, but through experimentation, they’d found that linking the words together like compound names let him convey more complex things.
He almost chuckled as the old commercial flicked through his mind. Had-a-baby it’s-a-boy.
He couldn’t even remember what it was a commercial for, but he’d remembered just how clever it had seemed to young him.
…And even that was more mental space than he really had to spare in such a fight.
The Plague Lord threw aside the crumbling and broken sword and roared, the sound resonating within Alex.
?????
Status Condition:Stunned
Partially Negated
Alex grimaced and finished the Shaped Force Burst that he’d been working on. It wasn’t sufficient to knock back the lunging undead, but it was enough to slam his own right arm up.
He reoriented it and fed in mana to trigger the working.
The hit hurt, but it worked, his arm—and dadao—rising faster than his partially stunned body could move, causing the Plague Lord to run into the tip of the weapon…
The non-thrusting weapon… hitting the armored chest…
It barely inconvenienced the beast.
The Plague Lord bulled through the minor impediment before impacting into Alex, hitting him at an upward angle before grabbing around his waist and twisting.
Only after he’d already been lifted free of the ground did Alex recognize it as something of a wrestler's tackle.
Regardless of exact technique, Alex was momentarily in close contact with his enemy, and as such he dumped HP into the Plague Lord and his armor. The next instant, Alex slammed into the ground, dazing him, but he kept the push of power.
The Plague Lord bellowed again—this time in something like frustrated pain—and it reared back, trying to strike at Alex, but Alex got his narrow shield up, slamming the point out in front of his fist into the monster’s chest and keeping it back enough that it had trouble landing solid hits, despite straddling Alex on the floor.
All the while, Alex continued dumping HP through their contact.
The Plague Lord’s armor was pitting and turning to rust, and the horror auras were pulling at Alex’s mind with flickers of impossible undulations of flesh even as the Flesh Golems provided truth behind the disgusting lie all around the massive room.
Gouts of flame and the regular cadence of gunshots helped anchor the otherwise roiling milieu of terror.
With another frustrated roar, the Plague Lord pulled back, briefly looking down at its own armor in anger.
Alex fought back to his feet, and even he knew it was a clumsy, dazed action, but it was apparently enough that he was at least upright when the Plague Lord came back in.
Alex attacked with Multi-Strike despite his still reeling mind, his dadao biting deeply into the Plague Lord’s thigh—through the all but disintegrated armor—just before the tip of his shield drove into the creature’s opposite shoulder hard enough to break bone.
The undead pressed through the hits, its head jerking forward like a striking snake, jaws gaping open.
Alex’s eyes widened as the Plague Lord bit down on the side of his neck, the attack momentarily disconcerting and surreal more than anything else.
Then, the pain hit.
He screamed.
Acting purely on instinct, his Life welled up within his blood, rushing to the sight of the injury even as he dismissed his shield and dadao to grip the crumbling armor of the Plague Lord with his hands.
In his panic, he slammed a few full-powered spike-knees up into the creature’s torso, bending the highly compromised metal of its chest plate even as he sent bursts of HP in that finally were too much for the enhanced material.
All this happened in less than a second, and the Plague Lord jerked back, screaming louder than Alex, tearing at its mouth as the flesh and bone began bubbling and frothing. The pure, overwhelming Life energy in Alex’s blood was quite obviously too much for it.
Alex had a moment to feel triumph, during which he slapped his hand across his bleeding bite-wound and sent his HP and Life into it, healing the physical damage while making the HP depletion temporarily worse.
That was awful, but I suppose for a boss fight it wasn’t so bad. Over faster than I feared, too. Sure, I took some hits, but he went down easier than I—
The Plague Lord ripped off its lower jaw and threw it aside, a gout of black, fetid sludge disgorging through the new cavity and carrying the remains of Alex’s blood with it.
Oh… not dead yet.
He stumbled forward, calling his sword and shield back to hand… just as the Plague Lord manifested a wicked bone axe from somewhere and struck.
Alex jerked his shield up, deflecting the first strike, but the Plague Lord was fast, and in the next seconds, it rained axe-blows upon Alex, slowly turning his shield to kindling.
Alex was able to land a few cuts with his dadao in return, but it was obvious who was getting the better end of the confrontation. He was off balance and trying to recover both his mentality and his footing. Without the shield, he’d likely already be dead, and it was almost gone.
Alex blinked once, remembering that he’d gotten a second shield. Bless you, Chip!
The Plague Lord splintered off the front portion, just beyond Alex’s fist, and Alex jerked backward to avoid the return swing.
In the brief moment that afforded him, he lunged forward and to the side, sending the ruined shield back into his inventory and executing a two-handed slash at the already damaged leg of the Plague Lord, cutting deeper, but not all the way through.
Son of all the motherless goats!
Another roar joined the sounds of battle around them, and Alex was barely able to pull out his second shield in time to catch the next strike.
This one held enough malice and ill-intent that the shield audibly cracked from that first blow.
Not good!
The two combatants fell into a back and forth with Alex pushing his HP out through his dadao—just as he’d pushed it down the rods when practicing against Stephen—leaving ragged cuts, the flesh dissolving to each side with each strike. In return, the Plague Lord landed devastating hits to his shield that threatened to stagger Alex at every turn.
Even as he landed hits and blocked every incoming attack—whether on his shield or with Life’s Active Defense—Alex couldn’t help but feel like he was coming out the worse of the two in the exchanges.
His shield fractured, and he knew that the balance would be further skewed any moment.
He almost pulled out one of the Inventory expansion cubes to block for even a moment, but he somehow knew even the stack of all those he had wouldn’t be enough to stop the thing, and their loss would be dearly felt later.
He did pull out a stone paver he couldn’t remember picking up, the only one he had.
The bone axe slammed into the block even as it appeared on the back of Alex’s arm, the powerful blow turning the concrete to dust even as that strike was blunted.
Alex frantically scanned his Inventory, even as he scanned the battlefield and found that while his companions weren’t dead or seriously injured, they weren’t anywhere close to winning and coming to his aid.
Then, his mind locked onto something in his storage space that should have been his first thought.
The next swing of the axe came in, and met a stack of three wooden shingles, each meticulously carved with a strengthening rune.
…The axe chopped through all three.
Even so, it was slowed enough that it didn’t cut through the greatcoat sleeve, even if it did briefly crack the bones beneath.
Injury:Minor Fracture x2
HP Required to Heal: 500
He growled, using his Life Manipulation spell to heal it before the next attack could come in.
In that way, Alex fell into a new pattern.
Alex had five main ways of blocking the Plague Lord’s physical attacks when he couldn’t dodge or otherwise move out of the way. To be fair, he could do that more than he’d expected due to his Advanced Kinesthetics skill coupled with his Great Blade’s skill and the training he’d undergone.
The most obvious means of blocking was Life’s Active Defense, which still hurt him, even if far less than an unblocked attack would have. This actually exposed a flaw in that skill that he hadn’t considered before, as Alex was sure that other skills—like Natasha’s Force Shield—could completely mitigate the damage from weaker attacks. For truly powerful hits, Alex’s skill was wonderful, but in a battle of attrition like this? Would have been better to have a weaker, complete defense.
All choices have consequences…
Second was a strategic use of his Shaped Force Burst whether to move himself or deflect the massive axe in some manner.
Third was the ablative application of stacks of his strengthened wooden slats.
Through practical testing, Alex found that it took five of the shingles to reduce the damage of a standard attack from the beast to a point that his greatcoat could negate the remainder, all five being destroyed in the process. As such, this was a very finite solution, even with hundreds of them in his Inventory.
Fourth was to simply deflect the attacks with his dadao by leaning heavily on his Great Blades Initiate skill. Unfortunately, due to their relative skill levels, Alex couldn’t reliably do that without prolonging the already overlong clash. He was sure that the Plague Lord would have more endurance than he did, so a stalemate was as good as a loss.
Even so, his dadao was used in the fourth method of deflection as well, along with Multi-Strike, and here Alex found himself once again sensing the build-up of energy after the second such strike each time.
As such, their fight continued, dragging out through long seconds.
Alex’s left hand caught the ax, Life’s Active Defense flowing through him even as his dadao left a sizzling cut on the flesh beneath the all-but-gone armor
His mind strained to create the right form, and mana triggered it just in time to bump the ax upward even as he ducked low, spinning and leaving another slash to reduce its HP.
The constant buzz of his Resistance to Examination let him know that John and others were checking on him, but he maintained his current message.
A powerful downward cut forced him to simply deflect even as he jumped sideways, sending the axe crashing into the ground. Not that such slowed the avalanche much.
Multi-Strike triggered, and Alex pushed, still only getting one hit and one deflection from the skill this time around.
Throughout, the Plague Lord was continuing to send puffs of black fog his way, forcing him to drain his HP ever more to resist… well, at least reducing his recovery rate.
Deflection.
Stack of shingles.
Dodge.
Dodge.
Cut.
Shingles.
Block! His dadao groaned as he had to fully take a hit with it between him and the heavy axe.
He could practically feel the dadao weakening, but he couldn’t spare the HP to repair it.
He was thrown to the side where he hit the ground and rolled, barely coming back to his feet in time to use Multi-Strike and push, but still only two strikes, the first one deflecting the incoming attack, and the second scoring a new line across the increasingly ragged flesh.
Force-Burst.
Shingles.
Strike to the helmet, that bit of armor somehow more resilient to HP. Wasted!
Multi-strike… It was right there, like another rung on the monkeybars as he was trying to quickly traverse them. He couldn’t quite reach it.
Life’s Active Defense took the next hit as he’d delayed overlong in his attempt to extend Multi-Strike.
More shingles, and he was starting to get low.
This was unsustainable, but he’d known that from the beginning.
The exchange continued, and he tried to lean more and more on Multi-Strike.
Finally, he growled and used it for two hits in a row.
He landed both on the already weakened left leg of the Plague Lord. His second hit landed at the same time as the axe, Alex having to ignore his Danger Sense to land the second hit.
Alex didn’t know if the Plague Lord had purposely mirrored him or not, but regardless, the heavy blade bit through his greatcoat, through his thigh, and stuck in the bone of his leg, drawing forth a scream.
In point of fact, both fighters screamed, the Plague Lord toppling with its leg removed. In that moment of pure agony and instinct, Alex’s body grabbed on where his mind couldn’t, and a third strike chained onto his Multi-Strike.
The dadao lifted and chopped at the Plague Lord’s neck even as they both fell, the skill carrying the attack more than Alex’s pain-wracked body could have.
It landed true, but didn’t have enough force to behead the beast.
It did have enough power to cut through the strap holding the helmet in place.
As Alex and the Plague Lord hit the ground, the helmet bounced free, and Alex barely managed to change his message to John, even as he frantically pulled out one of their group's few Health Potions—a regeneration variety—and downed it before things could go even further sideways.
Kill-it! Shoot-it-in-the-head!
It was a clean communication, ignoring the frankly insane levels of noise in the underground space, not to mention being faster than any word or hand-gesture, assuming the other party was looking for it.
John was, of course, paying close attention, and he didn’t disappoint.
Less than a half-second after Alex had flipped his message, a much louder gunshot boomed through the underground space, and the Plague Lord’s head vaporized.