Why did the mages send such weak heroes after him? What was even the point? Elias pushed himself upright with a shaking arm, his other arm clutching the side of his stomach that he hadn't managed to heal properly, his face paling slightly from the amount of blood that he was losing. By now, the divine magic that had so far been helping him was completely absent from the fight, as his patron god had likely completely given up on him by that point. Despite this, though, he still got up, which, if the mage hadn't been so cowardly, would have actually been a trait that he would have loved in the man; but because he was a hero, he held no love toward the man at all. If anything, he despised him, if only because he was indirectly involved in his own undoing. Surely he should have known that coming here, of all places, would not have been a good idea. So what was it?
"May I ask you a question?" he asked, making sure to compress the left hemisphere of his brain and hide away his divine presence to communicate in the mortal tongue, just as the hero reached for his staff on the ground. "Why did your masters send you here? You're not the first hero I have fought, you know." He was genuinely curious. Of all the times he fought against all of the invading warriors that stormed his castle in order to take his head, he never really took the time to actually commune with them much. It was stupid, kind of, but now he was genuinely curious now, as to what the goal of this all was to them.
Elias's hand shook as he lifted the staff, a green glow emanating from the ruby at the top of the crude staff as it slowly began to heal him. "You wouldn't understand." Blood flecked his lips, but the light from his staff's outer rune kept working, knitting the more egregious wounds before eventually closing off the flesh entirely, even as he trembled in place, a clear sign of fatigue if he'd ever seen one. "You never could," he went on, his voice rough but steadying as the magic took hold. What nonsense was this? Didn't he comprehend that this was the exact reason he was trying to communicate with him?
To understand?
"You know, if you don't tell me the answer now, I can just extract it from your soul later." He didn't like the fact that he needed to threaten him. Elias huffed out something that might have been a laugh if it hadn't ended in a wet cough. He planted the butt of his staff against the floor to steady himself, his shoulders slumping as the healing magic finally sputtered out, the glow at the ruby's heart dimming to a dim ember. "Go ahead," he rasped. "Rip it out of me if you want." Luckwig's eyes burned brighter for a fraction of a second, the flames behind them guttering with irritation.
He wanted to negotiate things peacefully in order to get answers out of him without terribly scarring his soul or doing anything particularly egregious to him afterward, but that was clearly not an option. "Fine," he said, raising his sword upward and imbuing his mana into its base structure. "You'll die here." From the side, the sound of armor scraping against stone was heard, and Luckwig turned his eyes only to see the hero he had momentarily taken out of the fight getting back up.
He looked afraid.
Ashford staggered fully into view, his one good hand braced against the ruined pillar as he dragged himself upright. Blood seeped through the cracks in his armor, running in dark rivulets down the gold-inlaid edges of his shield, but the sigils etched across its face still burned faintly, stubbornly refusing to go dark even as the hero's blood began to obscure the runic inscriptions from one another and pollute the mana allowing the horribly inscribed mechanisms to work.
Human ingenuity was truly something. Ashford coughed, spitting a dark clump of blood onto the fractured stone at his feet. He forced his legs to straighten anyway, his teeth bared in something that might once have been a grin, but he wasn't fooling anyone. He could see his servant on the man's back, which clearly indicated that he was afraid. Maybe he was trying to keep his morale up and not fall into despair?
"I'm not done yet, asshole!" Ashford shouted, his voice cracking despite the sheer stubbornness it exuded. He hammered his fist against his dented shield, a hollow clang that echoed through the throne room. "I don't think that's true. You should not be standing with all of those wounds on your body. Even I'm surprised that you're alive right now." Luckwig said flatly.
Ashford spat again, dragging a breath into his lungs despite the pain. "Yeah," he wheezed, lifting his shield despite the tremor running through his arm, "well… you're not the first monster to say that," he said boisterously, the sum of his fear beginning to recede as the spirit on his back slowly began to loosen its grip.
"Yeah, but I will be the last," he said matter-of-factly. "But," Luckwig continued before either of them could voice their opinion, "Since you're proving rather difficult to kill, I'm going to stop utilizing my swordsmanship and just kill you with my magic instead."
In his hand, the bloody blade began to unravel, dissolving back into vaporous strands of mana that bled into the air. It screeched as it went, the membranes of its exterior shaking before dissolving away with the rest of the motes of light.
Of course, unwilling to simply allow their enemy to charge up and gain an advantage over them, Ashford charged head-on, the wounds covering his body healing rapidly as he closed the distance, his shield raised high before he leapt into the air with a battle cry.
Elias's staff glowed, clearly using some kind of magic on the warrior as he charged, but it didn't matter. Luckwig met his charge head-on, a deafening boom sounding through the room, causing the floor to shake slightly before Ashford was thrown away from Luckwig.
Even though the dark Lord was a magic caster his raw strength couldn't be underestimated.
But it was not him that was the one to throw away the hero.
But rather a weird looking creature did
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Ketta
4
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Ketta lay half-embedded in a pile of stones, the top and lower ends of her torso completely disconnected from the rest of her body. There was no blood on the ground or in the surrounding environment, despite the gruesome nature of her apparent death, and when she came to, her eyes opening in the tiny hole at the front part of her skull, from atop the pile, at the awkward angle her head had been hurriedly placed in, she blinked, just as the universe slowly began to remember how gravity was supposed to work around her.
Several things around and in front of her fell, vanishing out of her line of sight and into the seemingly bottomless void where her vision ended. But, where exactly they went, she didn't know. All she heard was a brief shifting of what she presumed to be coins and other metal before the sounds completely went away.
Despite that, however, she could move and even speak, but how she could do that with her body being torn apart like that, she didn't exactly know, which was becoming a sort of theme around here. Where was she, anyway? It was a cave, as far as she knew, but it also seemed a tad massive in her opinion.
If it was a dragon's cave, she was definitely going to die, but why she hadn't died before when the lich grabbed her concerned her a lot more than being eaten by an oversized lizard.
The death of the body was a temporary thing, but the death of the spirit was completely unfixable, save for the mercy and intervention of a God to undo the process.
That's what the freaks that brought her into this world said anyhow.
Speaking of which, where was she?
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Ashford
6
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A thunderous boom sounded in the throne room as an ethereal being tore itself free from Luckwig's shadow to meet Ashford's charge head-on, the impact of the two colliding shattering the little that remained of the floor beneath them, driving the hero back a full dozen feet away from the lich, his heels gouging trenches through the marble floor before he finally skidded to a halt. The thing that the lich had loosed from his shadow did not resemble a summon at all, and if it was one, it was unlike anything either of them had ever seen before. It was a hideous looking creature, which was to be expected, but its sheer strength despite being an undead was impressive.
"What—" He coughed, staring up at the large lanky creature. "the fuck is that thing?"
The creature straightened its posture, its silhouette stretching slightly as it pulled itself fully free from the shadow. It was tall, its limbs elongated and jointed at an odd angle, and looking at it from afar, it was as if someone had taken a human frame and remembered it incorrectly. Blackened bone showed through the thick patches of leathery ash-gray skin, and along the tips of the fur on its hand were thin veils of shadow clinging to it, peeling off in tatters as it moved.
It didn't have a face, just a smooth, featureless mask split only by a vertical seam that every so often dripped some blood onto the floor, which its long tongue, protruding out of its rib cage, licked off the ground. Luckwig's voice cut through the ringing chaos, despite the shockwave of debris settling from the previous clash. "Kill that one…" he said, pointing at Ashford, "and I'll deal with the mage," he ordered, the entity's head narrowing before it moved slowly towards Ashford.
Ashford staggered back instinctively, his bloodied hands tightening around the straps of his shield. "What the hell is that thing?" he asked, fear in his voice as he took a step backward away from the slowly approaching monstrosity. "It might be a corpse puppet or a summon; I can't tell." Elias swallowed, forcing his breathing to slow as the thing advanced. "It doesn't have any binding glyphs, which would signal that it was a summon, so there is no luck with the nature goddess to banish it, but it might be an undead."
"And I don't think my ho—"
The mage's eyes went wide half a second before a clawed hand wrapped around his lower jaw, slamming him into the floor before he or Ashford could react, just as a slowly widening portal began to open up from beneath him. Ashford only had a moment to react as his friend slipped into the darkness with the demon, leaving him all alone with the featureless monstrosity that was spawned in the room, but he allowed his attention to slip, and his foe took quick advantage of that.
"Eli—!" He couldn't even finish the sentence, much less register what had happened by the time the dark shadow that was looming over him appeared, and in the same quick manner in which it did, it sent him flying into the air, the breath in his lungs gone as the world spun around him in various shades of color. He tried to control his momentum, but that only worsened his symptoms, and by the time he had managed to collect himself, the creature was already upon.
The creature landed on him just as his back hit the floor, seizing him by his good arm while its other claw dug into his armor, sliding through the gaps and rending the metal and fabric in an attempt to gouge into his skin. It was frantic and sloppy, completely out of coordination in its movement, its animalistic nature showing as it yelled in an incoherent language that was similar to its master while it worked away at him, but Ashford didn't just sit there and take it lying down. He fought back, as fiercely as he could.
He punched upward, his fist driving into the underside of the creature's ribcage with a wet crack, his knuckles screaming as they pummeled straight through the creature's underbelly, causing it to stagger back with a screech while its grip loosened, allowing Ashford to grab the creature's arm and twist, rolling his shoulder and dragging the monster off-balance with him, its claw tearing free from his armor as they slammed backward into the floor together.
Ignoring the impact that was done to his body, he focused on his combatant as it hit the ground a moment after he did, its elongated limbs scrambling uselessly for purchase but finding none. It tried to push him off, but Ashford wouldn't have any of it. He seized the moment with a snarl, rolling on top of it before driving his knee down into its chest. The impact of his blow tore through its flesh and exposed the bone beneath its thick hide, which elicited a shriek from the monster before he raised his hand up and punched it again.
Blood was everywhere, but it didn't matter. Adrenaline drowned out the pain flaring up in his arm as his fist rose and fell again, each blow landing with a sickening crunch as the thing beneath him convulsed and howled. Whatever in the thing's weird biology that passed for blood sprayed across his gauntlet, but Ashford barely noticed it at all. The creature thrashed, its elongated limbs flailing wildly, its claws scoring furrows in the marble as it tried to gain leverage.
One of its hands raked across Ashford's side, tearing through his already damaged armor and opening him up again, but the hero only growled and leaned into it, driving his weight forward. He slammed his knee down once more, feeling its ribs give way beneath the impact, and this time something inside the creature ruptured with a wet pop, the creatures movement stopping instantly as if it's body had gone into shock.
It didn't last long, though. It shrieked, its movements growing erratic in a desperate attempt to get him off, but it was useless. The vertical seam in its featureless mask split, dribbling a dark fluid down its chest as the shadows that had clung to it peeled away from its form. Ashford drew his arm back for another strike but never got the opportunity to as the world lurched.
The creature froze mid-thrash, its scream cutting off abruptly as every vein of shadow that was still attached to its form snapped, all of them stretching back toward the far end of the throne room. Time had completely frozen, and neither he nor the creature could truly move as the thing was pulled back into the place from where it originally came from.
The throne, or at least, the Central point of the magic within this castle.
Ashford hit the floor hard as the creature was yanked off him, the sudden absence of its weight knocking the wind from his lungs a second time. He rolled instinctively, coughing and scrambling backward on one elbow as the thing was dragged away.
"What the fuck is happening now?"