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Alex almost relaxed, just laying out on the ground in exhaustion now that the Plague Lord was headless.
Thankfully, several things absolutely demanded his attention and prevented him from taking even a moment’s break.
First, most of the Flesh Golems of the Plague Guard were still alive, and his companions were starting to look harried.
Second, the undead from the tunnels had apparently been joining in the fight for quite a while, only the efforts of those already fighting were keeping them at bay.
Finally—and most importantly—there hadn’t been a kill notice.
Alex rolled toward his opponent before doing a little, awkward hop-lunge forward while still mostly prone. Was it graceful? No. But it was enough to get him to the Plague Lord.
Another shot rang out, cratering the creature’s chest, but there was still no notice, and John’s help with the others was being missed.
Thanks-for-the-help I’ll-be-fine-now
Alex flipped the message John would see when Analyzing him even as he drew himself up enough to do a Multi-Strike with his dadao.
Alex hit each shoulder of the—apparently—momentarily downed monster. The flat, hard concrete of the floor acted as a cutting board of sorts, allowing him to cut both arms free with the one action.
He flopped onto the body, dismissing his dadao and touching each arm, pushing HP in to ash them.
It had been less than five seconds since the head was vaporized.
The corpse bucked once under him, nearly throwing him off, as undeath rolled off of it in waves causing Alex’s skin to rot and flake before his powerful regeneration stemmed the tide and began healing him once more.
Well, fill me with candy and call me a piñata. It’s trying to ‘Phase 2’ us.
Alex would have none of it.
His damaged leg was mostly back together, but his HP was in the tank, sitting at barely over three thousand out of his usual eleven.
His leg was what mattered though, and he fought to get up, straddling the Plague Lord to pin it down. None too soon, as the body began to thrash and roll, attempting to work its way free without any arms, sending clouds of undeath radiating up around Alex like the pulse of a horrid heart. Thankfully, while these were more consistent and unrelenting, they lacked the power of the first wave.
He immediately remembered why he’d never particularly liked wrestling or ground-work, but put his own issues aside and began funneling his HP into the Plague Lord at two hundred points a second. The undeath waves negated most of the HP regeneration that he’d kept for himself, but he needed this thing dead-dead.
It was a risk he would have to take.
The Health Potion was one that amplified his own regeneration by a factor of five and would last a good long while. As such, he was generating a bit more than a whopping two hundred and fifty points of health every second.
He did not think about how low he’d gotten near the end of the last phase if he had only recovered to around three thousand HP after near to five seconds of regeneration, aided by the potion.
In theory, this meant that—with the four-to-one amplification of damage to undead—he was ‘harming’ the Plague Lord by roughly eight hundred points worth every second which… should be a lot?
He also put in a thousand Life, just for good measure, though he sent that with the command to learn what it could as it attacked.
Alex was painfully aware that the trope of multiplying a boss’s health to make it a better challenge was widely used. Even some of the few LitRPGs he’d read before all this had used the same thought process. Regardless, for all he knew, this thing had hundreds of thousands of health.
Still, if all he had to do was hold it here and dump HP in? It wouldn’t be too terrible.
The thought had barely come to his mind when the bones within the not-corpse began to shift and rearrange, even under the continued onslaught of HP.
Alex’s Danger Sense began screaming, and he pulled his dadao from Inventory and slammed it downward just in time to meet a bone-blade thrusting up from within the ragged form.
Over the next ten seconds, his Danger Sense screamed at him almost constantly, and he frantically used most of his tools yet again.
Life’s Active Defense let him catch a bone-spear on his left hand.
A stack of strengthened wooden shingles spoiled the sweeping slash of a scythe arching up from the torn-open side.
His dadao was a constant shield, turned side-ways to catch any number of bone-spur projectiles.
It was only a blessing that the hips apparently weren’t able to be shaped into such weapons, or Alex might have been pilloried as violently as an enemy of Vlad.
This whole time, Alex’s Advanced Kinesthetics and martial training—both real and System granted—informed him how he needed to move to keep the mount. His Physical and Mental Agility let him keep up with those instincts. His Health Potion augmented regeneration let him pour HP into his enemy while also keeping him from rotting away under the black—and now occasionally green—wave of vapor that practically poured off the corpse, the Plague Lord seemingly rotting in real time to send more attacks at Alex.
There was even a moment where it felt like something tried to grab the boss and pull it away.
Alex didn’t understand beyond seeing the mana gather, feeling the sense of danger such a departure instilled within him, and sensing an oddly not-quite-physical tug, but he gripped into the Plague Lord then using his heels, and his hands sunk into undead flesh and held fast to bone despite taking several hits for the trouble.
A moment later, whatever working or magic it had been—whether it came from the Plague Lord, the System, or something else—passed, and Alex was able to continue his frantic assault.
He was too close for full swings of his sword, even if he’d had the freedom to just attack, but in that frantic scramble, he remembered an item that he really should have thought of sooner.
James’ knife.
Alex triggered Multi-Strike, pushing to use it for three actions.
His right hand and dadao moved impossibly fast, spoiling two attacks, and he directed the final skill effect toward his left arm.
He felt a spike of danger from behind him, but he was committed and was not going to let this thing somehow escape.
The knife came into his left hand from his Inventory, and he rammed it through the rib-cage—ruined both by John’s shot and its own hostile rearrangement—and into what remained of its heart.
Magic pulsed outward from the knife just as two somethings struck Alex from behind, knocking him forward even as they pierced through his greatcoat.
He jerked sideways in an involuntary spasm, smashing the flat of his dadao, up near the top, into the concrete.
Alex barely registered the crack-ting from the blade as two bone-spikes came out of his upper chest, one near each shoulder, lacking power to punch back out through his coat, and having been deflected out toward the sides by coat and ribs.
Alex looked down at the bulges, feeling a bit light-headed.
Oh… the legs… It made its legs into scorpion tails… that’s… that’s tricksy.
He’d stopped sending HP into the boss, but the five minute timer on the regeneration boost from the health potion wasn’t quite up yet.
That was likely the only reason he was still conscious.
His HP was bouncing up and down just above a thousand.
Alex’s mind’s eye watched the number bob up and down for a second or two before his focus shifted from the numerator to the denominator.
His Life was still all but full.
With a feeble growl and slowly tunneling vision, he reactivated his Basic Life Transfusion and did exactly that, sending purely destructive Life through the spikes in his back.
Almost immediately, the hostile bone within him turned to ash and dust within his wounds, and he slowed the transfusion, needing all he had left for the moment, but unwilling to let up the assault.
His arms were uselessly hanging at his sides, but his eyes focused on the anti-undead knife sticking from the mangled corpse below him.
With deliberate effort, Alex pulled up Shaped Force Burst.
He couldn’t tell if it took him an eyeblink or an hour, but he formed a powerful, concentrated strike, aiming at the pommel of that knife.
His vision was all but gone, fully tunneled in on the knife even as the System still projected the symbol set into his mind as he finished it.
Alex could no longer see… he would have to trust that it was still aimed correctly.
Mana flowed into the form and a powerful combined hit drove the knife deeper, its magic flowing outward yet again.
The healing potion timer ran out.
Alex collapsed sideways.
A kill notification triggered within his mind.
Unconsciousness claimed him.
Alex slowly came back to consciousness, and the first thing he was aware of was pain.
Shortly thereafter, he became aware of a lot of notifications waiting for him, even if he lacked the coherence to actually look at them and understand what they contained.
Finally, his vision began to come into play, and it took far longer than it should have for him to realize that he was staring up at an open sky, even though he was lying in the shade.
Not underground? Not inside at all?
He didn’t hear anyone screaming, and while he could smell blood—a scent that had become all too familiar to him of late—he didn’t think it was very fresh.
Fetid blood was an even more familiar scent, if he were being honest, but he set that aside as well.
“He’s awake!” It was a male voice, which Alex placed as Ben after half a second’s thought.
Alex tried to respond, but it came out as a groan.
Soon, all six of his spear guards were around him, smiling down as they crouched.
Oh… I must be on the ground. The grass? That’s why it’s so soft… He drifted momentarily, but snapped back to focus, finding Jacob mid-sentence.
“—so we knew you were okay, and it was just like we hoped, every one of the undead underground lost their animating force.”
Leanne interjected there. “Some of the undead on the surface were apparently not ‘linked in’ to the Plague Lord, but it was trivial for the forces we’d left to defend ground level to mop those up. It was mostly fodder and other Simple or Common variants.”
Alex blinked, frowning. “What—?”
But he’d spoken so softly that no one had heard him. Even so, it seemed that Laura had been paying enough attention to notice his mouth move, even if just slightly. “What was that Alex?”
“What’s going on?”
She grinned down at him. “We won, Alex. This scenario is over.”
Natasha interjected. “You’ll want to check your notifications sooner rather than later, but know that we only have about ten hours left before the System pulls us out… or something like that.”
“...time?”
She frowned, then grunted. “It’s a couple of hours before sunset. You’ve been unconscious most of the day.”
Alex glanced at his status and blanched at one part in particular.
HP: 592/592 [11025]
It was no wonder he felt terrible. He’d apparently dumped a lot more Life into the Plague Lord than he’d realized.
Chip chimed in then. “Brianne did what she could, but she said that your health was full, even if it seemed lower than it should have been.”
Alex grimaced. “Yeah. Spent Life to end him. Maybe too much.”
That brought frowns all around, and Natasha voiced her concern. “Are you going to be alright?”
He weakly waved away her concern. “Yeah. I just need time.” He grimaced. “Help me sit up?”
Many hands reached, and he found the act trivial with all the assistance.
“Thank you.” He used a bit of mana to Create Water in his mouth, leaving it at base temperature for the moment, just using the water to moisten his parched lips and throat. “Better.”
He looked around and saw that there was quite a bit of activity in the nearby buildings as Initiates and non seemed to be going through the buildings and pulling out anything of potential use and dividing it all into various piles.
“What’s going on?”
Natasha chuckled. “We were told to ‘grab anything we wanted’ before the end, and we may have taken that a bit more literally than the System intended. We’re sweeping through and gathering anything that anyone might want and organizing it, so the Initiates can take their pick. We six were tasked with watching you and the couple other seriously wounded.”
Alex frowned, briefly glancing to the sides and seeing a few other sleeping people before refocusing on what was effectively looting. “Why are the non-Initiates going along with it?”
She shrugged. “We told them we’re looking for things that will be useful in the coming days. Even with most of the undead handled in the scenario, I imagine it will be a bit before any official assistance comes. It just makes sense.”
He took a deep breath then, realizing that for the first time in weeks, the air wasn’t filled with undeath. That brought a smile to his face. He then briefly tried to find someone before just asking. “Is Kaylee helping them?”
Natasha’s smile grew to a grin. “She is churning the base, removing all but the basic defenses and creating necessities for the non-Initiates, just in case the base system shuts down when we are taken but we’re still judged on their survival.”
He blinked a few times, trying to understand what she meant. “What?”
“Several of us have quests that imply the System will calculate survival rates after we depart, so if we leave them with no food, water, or shelter and no way to get it, we guessed it would harm our rewards.”
He grunted. “Smart.”
“Thank you.” Her tone was flat, but a smile still tugged at her lips.
They chatted a bit more, Alex specifically not asking about deaths. He knew there’d been a butcher's bill, but with how he felt at the moment? He didn’t think he could handle it.
He cared, but there was nothing he could do about it in the moment, and he was just so blasted tired. He knew that he couldn’t take knowing.
Even still, Natasha told him, and he didn’t have it in him to stop her.
Two hundred non-Initiates had died, no Initiates. Alex was immediately grateful, and he immediately felt horrific for his relief.
Still, it was done, and he now knew.
Finally, there was a lull, and Ben clapped him on the shoulder. “You really should go through your notifications. Accept your experience too. I bet even you earned a level-up, eh?”
Alex’s eyes widened, and he felt himself grin as he was reluctantly pulled from his melancholy. “Yeah, I hope so.”
The others confirmed that such should be his priority and so, without further delay, he set to it.