Blessed Time: The Complete Series: (A LitRPG Adventure Box Set), page 122
Instead, he reached out with his senses, using the power of the crown to locate alarms and enchantments that protected the balcony and the crystal doors that led to the manor itself. One by one, he redirected or temporarily disabled them before landing soundlessly on the marble patio.
His gloved hand pushed the doors open, letting them swing out smoothly on an unlit parlor. Micah took one step inside before his Arcana skill practically began screaming at him. The entire building was infused with ritual magic and the taint of Elsewhere, hardly surprising given that the Count had used daemons to undermine the provincial armies in a previous life, but still, the scope of what he was feeling surprised him.
Short of Micah’s brief stint inside Elsewhere itself, he couldn’t think of a time or place where the sensation had been stronger. Even his fights with the Third Prince’s avatar or his interactions with the daemon’s dread symphonies, all of it paled in comparison to the overwhelming stench of otherworldly power. It was almost like standing in the aura of a luoca. He could feel the barriers between Karell and the other plane stretching thin, almost to the point where Micah could reach out and touch the mists themselves.
He deactivated the bracelet before it could overload and harm him. The crown would still tell him where active spells and enchantments were, and that would have to be enough for the time being.
Then Micah left the room, making his way toward a nearby staircase and traveling upward. Every thirty or so seconds, he would stop, using Dakkora’s artifact to modify the flow of magic around him to prevent the building’s automatic defenses from detecting his presence, but slowly and surely, he made progress.
Of course, there was no way of knowing that he was moving toward the right target. After all, he was simply searching blindly for evidence about the Count. Right now, he was moving mostly based off of intuition and the distinct sensation of enough magical energy to make a room on the fourth floor shine like the noonday sun.
Below, on the ground floor, Micah could feel ordinary levels of magic as powerful blessed that made up Sandrovok’s nobility and knighthood milled about. A chamber orchestra was playing a waltz as they undoubtedly danced and networked, making connections and trade deals under the pretense of enjoying themselves at a party.
He couldn’t know for sure if all of the guests in the manor were spies or turncoats, but given the taint of Elsewhere on the knight he followed to the estate, Micah suspected that the majority were. At the very minimum, all of Count Arass’ supporters were clearly in league with the Third Prince.
Micah ducked into a doorway, activating the bracelet again as soon as he made it to the fourth floor. A guard wearing a tuxedo and with a rapier at his belt walked by. As much as the man looked like one of the spoiled courtiers on the ground floor, Micah could see from the scar on his face and the way the soldier carried himself that he had actual combat experience.
After letting the man pass, Micah counted to five, ensuring that the warrior would be out of sight before he continued toward his target. He spent that time layering himself with spells. If all went well, he would be able to use the crown to avoid detection, but at the same time, Micah hadn’t had much interaction with the Count in his last life. By the time he hit the front lines in the war against Pereston, the Empress had already personally driven him out of Sandrovok and into Pereston, where the Third Prince sacrificed him. Micah had no way of knowing precisely what powers the man had. Things had gone smoothly so far, but if they were to go wrong, this was the moment when his fortunes would turn.
The room had one guard standing outside, but she didn’t stand a chance. Even without casting Haste, Micah would have been able to overpower her before she sounded the alarm, but with the spell in place, he was as fast as a blur, closing the ground between them and slamming his spear into her face with enough force that the point pushed clean through, pinning her to the stone pillar at her back for a half second before he withdrew the weapon with a wet squelch.
He took a moment disabling the enchantments on the wooden door before he tried the handle. Unsurprisingly, it was locked, but that was hardly enough to slow Micah. His arm bulged as he twisted the handle and pressed his shoulder into the center of the door. With a metallic ‘crunch,’ the door jolted as Micah’s high body attribute shattered both the lock and hinges. Gently, he lifted the door, shifting it to the side before he stepped into the room.
It was a study. A pair of fancy couches sat on either side of a long, rectangular rug. At the foot and head of the tapestry stood a large fireplace, silent and dark, and a desk that took up almost the entire wall. Lining the study itself were bookshelves and paintings. All items that looked incredibly valuable in their own right, but the dense ball of defensive enchantments around the desk hinted that his true quarry lay there.
Just as Micah began the complicated process of unraveling the spells that protected the piece of furniture’s drawers, a flash of green light stole his attention. Glancing up, Micah saw that the grating in front of the fireplace had been blown away, revealing a roaring green flame with what appeared to be a man’s face visible in the jumping and dancing fire.
“Ah,” a male voice filled the room. “So you’re the one that killed Mari. Very impressive for one of the Empress’ lackeys to make it this far.”
Micah ignored the man. If he spoke, that would give the Count one more clue. Right now, all the man knew for sure was that someone had infiltrated his manor and killed one of his guards.
“Aren’t you curious as to how I detected you?” the face in the fire asked. “I’m surprised at how powerful your stealth blessing is. You’ve managed to evade more defensive enchantments and scans than the vault of the central bank. Still, you couldn’t stop yourself from killing my guard, and their lives are tied to mine. I could feel it the moment you snuffed her out. An amateur mistake if I do say so myself.”
Micah reached down, grasping hold of the handle to the desk’s main drawer. He’d managed to disable most of the damaging enchantments. All that was left was the alarms and defensive wards, but at this point, secrecy was no longer a major concern.
“All of my guards and guests have their lives tied to mine,” the other man sneered. “That’s how I know you aren’t someone I invited. Rather, you’re an interloper. A pest trying to-”
The drawer flashed with white light as Micah ripped it open. The entire manor filled with the shriek and clamor of alarms, but Micah didn’t pay them any mind. Instead, he reached past the shattered lock to grab a stack of letters, all bound with fine twine, the only contents of the drawer.
“Fine,” the fire snarled. “Be that way. I told you that all of their lives were mine. Now seems as good a time as any to make use of them.”
The fire winked out. If it hadn’t been for the grill, twisted and slightly melted and sitting on its side on the carpet, it would look like it had never been there.
Then, a wave of eldritch energy washed over Micah, and his Arcana skill screamed a warning. The entire building pulsed with ritual magic, enough that it almost felt like he had been transported to Elsewhere itself.
He took a step toward the window, planning on breaking out and using Flight to escape. The entire building shook, as if there had been an earthquake, and Micah’s eyes widened.
The marble wall that formed a massive circle around the estate was glowing green, runes that had previously been invisible burned with terrible purpose, channeling tremendous energy toward… something.
TEN
BEYOND EXPECTATION
Micah put his shoulder into the window, shattering it and leaping out into the night sky. Air rushed past him as he hastily tucked the letters into his carrying pouch. Already he could feel ritual energy coiling around him, nipping at his skin as it sought to pierce through his body and latch its claws into his soul.
The guards on the walls, the gardens, really all life other than Micah himself withered in a matter of seconds, their energy siphoned by the ritual circle. One by one, the handful of visible humans collapsed, streamers of green fire jumping from their bodies toward a point hovering in the air some hundred paces to Micah’s left, the absolute center of the circle formed by the wall.
Then the circle pulsed a second time, and streams of fire began to flow from the mansion, up into the air where they wound together. The flames writhed, forming esoteric and arcane symbols one after another that Micah could only grasp a fraction of.
A chill ran down Micah’s spine. He couldn’t understand the ritual. In all likelihood, no one below Dakkora’s level could, which made its existence all the more troubling. Count Arass was a summoner in the previous timeline, but he wasn’t capable of anything on this level. The man struggled to summon and leash a single luoca.
Micah turned toward the entrance to the estate and began flying away as fast as the spell would carry him. Someone had changed the past, and the only someones capable of that were himself and the Third Prince. Stopping here and now to stop the ritual wasn’t strictly necessary, and if Micah could help it, he didn’t want to get embroiled in a fight before he had secured the support of Sandrovok’s royal family. For now, all he needed to do was get the letters to Gwen so she could present them to her mother.
Just as he was about to cross the line formed by the wall, a long, deep ripping sound echoed through the air toward him, and a morbid sense of curiosity forced Micah to look over his shoulder. The sphere of green flames and runes was gone, replaced by a hole in space much larger than any he had ever seen before.
A claw, ruby red and as big as Micah’s torso, thrust through the opening. Behind the appendage, he could see the dimly glowing and ever roiling mists of Elsewhere. Almost instantly, Micah’s brain flipped back through the books on daemons he had read and came up blank. Whatever this was, it wasn’t anything that had been committed to writing.
Another claw pushed its way through the opening. With both of the appendages in the portal, there wasn’t much room left over, and for a moment, Micah let himself feel some relief. The monstrosity in the other world seemed to be too large for the summoning circle used by the Count.
Then, the claws pulled away from each other, stretching the boundaries of the glowing portal. The gateway held for a second, and then another ripping sound sent a shiver down Micah’s spine.
The glowing green boundaries were gone. Instead, there was an angry tear in the fabric of space itself, and the circular armored body of the daemon itself pushed its way through opening on a dozen massive armored legs, all of which ended in sharp stabbing points that punched holes through the roof of the Count’s manor.
It looked like a crab, but wrong in subtle ways. Its torso was almost perfectly circular, the same vibrant red as the claws, and it had half again more legs than it should. More importantly, where a crab would have a pair of beady black eyes, the monster had a pair of human heads.
The minute the human faces touched Karell’s air, they began to wail, gnashing their teeth and shaking their heads. Their discordant wails seemed to shake the air, and Micah felt a wave of nausea wash over him as his vision doubled.
With a wave of his hand, Wind Shield snapped into existence around Micah and he breathed a sigh of relief. He had amplified the effect of the spell to the point where all outside sounds were excluded, and already Micah could feel his eyesight returning to normal, but the same couldn’t be said for the Count’s manor.
If the aura from the luocas was like lapping waves against the sand castle of the physical world, gradually eroding it, the screams from the crab daemon’s eyes were a tsunami. They crashed into the building and the ceiling bent, parts bowing inward while ripples flowed across the stone like it was water.
Then, the roof shattered, most collapsing inward while parts sprang upward, forming a corona of mutating and shifting debris that orbited the monster. Droplets of molten marble floated gently in the air, gravity a meaningless concept while the heads wailed.
It turned the screeching heads toward Micah, and his skin began to burn as if he’d been out in the desert sun unprotected for hours. Both of its claws opened, revealing a pair of circular mouths at their bases, each lined with inward facing teeth like a shark or a remora.
He turned and ran.
Micah wasn’t sure what the creature was or what its abilities were. He didn’t even have a hint. What he did have was the evidence he’d need to begin the long process of mobilizing Sandrovok, and a general idea of how daemon summoning worked. The duration of a summon depended largely upon the size of the sacrifice used to draw it into the human world.
If he could draw the monster off into the desert, or better yet, escape entirely, it was only a matter of time before the energy that powered the daemon dissipated. Given the overwhelming power that the crab-thing was demonstrating, even with an entire mansion full of nobles, there wasn’t any way that it could last more than ten minutes, let alone the half hour or so it would take to get back to civilization.
A flash of rainbow light was all the warning that Micah had. He jerked to the left just as a jet of dark liquid sprayed past him. Even with his reactions, a drop landed on the Maarikava armor, and almost immediately, Micah’s Arcana skill began to scream a warning as it began to hiss and melt through the borderline artifact tier defense.
He fired an Air Knife at his own body as he spun around, barely denting the armor but sending the hissing and bubbling droplet flying into the air. One of the daemon’s pincers was open and extended, a thin trickle of the acidic liquid dripping from the circular mouth built into its base.
Both of the heads that passed for its eyes began to laugh, and Micah’s blood ran cold. He couldn’t hear them, Wind Shield was still sealing out all outside sounds, but the crab had climbed down off of the half destroyed manor, each step of its dozen legs melting through the now barren garden and turning the land into lifeless sludge as it scampered toward him with surprising speed.
Micah willed himself to fly backward. Flight didn’t differentiate between the direction that he was facing, and so long as Micah wasn’t trying to weave his way through some sort of narrow space filled with obstacles, he could keep his attention on the daemon. Given its speed and ranged ability, that was clearly the correct choice.
Experimentally, he summoned a Pressure Spear, tossing the spell at the daemon as he flew. The distortion zipped toward the crab. With supernatural quickness, both of the heads focused on it, letting out a hyena bark of laughter. Through his headband, Micah could feel the structure of his spell shatter, as the mana itself boiled and disappeared under the unnatural sonic assault.
It didn’t slow either, lifting its other pincer and opening it wide. This time, Micah wasn’t surprised when Foresight warned him of the blast acid, but even forewarned, the speed of the attack was breathtaking. He jerked upward only for the daemon’s claw to track him, tracing a line through the night sky as Micah dodged and wove to stay ahead of its attack.
By the time the acid beam stopped, almost five seconds had passed. He didn’t have any idea how much damage the virulent acid had caused where it landed in the desert. Hells, he wasn’t even sure how far the acid went. It was certainly coming out of the daemon’s mouth fast enough; it easily could have made it to the road or into one of the nearby trading posts.
He chanted the words to Binding Vines as the creature surged toward him, legs pumping fast enough that an ordinary human likely couldn’t see them. Really, the only saving grace of this scenario was that Count Arass valued his privacy. If this fight weren’t taking place deep in the desert, it would have been a massacre. Just the sound of the daemon’s wails would have been enough to kill thousands.
It raised its first arm, opening the pincer to fire again. Micah’s heart dropped. It had been less than a minute since its first attack, and if the daemon could fire the acid streams repeatedly, even with all of his gear, he might be in trouble.
A push of his mind switched the target of Binding Vines, and this time when the spell activated, the roots burst from the ground, grabbing the raised arm and jerking it downward before it could fire. Acid sprayed into the sand at absurd pressures, melting a deep, narrow tunnel into the desert.
But, for a brief second, the acid stream was impacting on the open ground without any sort of hole to absorb the backsplash. The dark liquid sprayed everywhere, including back onto the daemon and the vines that were holding it in place.
Micah didn’t have much hope for the vines surviving long against the daemon. Between its massive size and the reality-slagging screams of its eyes, it would have only been a matter of seconds rather than minutes before the beast broke free. The acid caused even those weak hopes to vanish in a flash.
The hardened roots that had pinned any number of high-level foes dissolved like salt in a pitcher of water as the acid devoured them, destabilizing their mana and undoing Micah’s spell in an eyeblink. His only consolation was watching the same acid burn fist-sized holes in the daemon’s thick armor, revealing tender flesh underneath.
It shook like a dog drying itself, trying to rid its body of the clinging acid with partial success, but that moment bought Micah a little more time to open the distance. As he flew, he began casting Explosive Thicket repeatedly. The spikes and roots wouldn’t do much damage, but they would slow the pursuing daemon, hopefully keeping it at a far enough distance that Micah could dodge its acid beams until it ran out of animating energy.
After it ran into the second spell, the pair of heads on the daemon stilled for a second, no longer laughing madly. Then, the monster leapt into the air as both of them burst into tears.
Micah gritted his teeth as a wave of unnatural energy washed over him. The sound of the heads’ lamentations might not be able to reach him, but the taint of Elsewhere could. His Arcana skill pushed itself to the limit, shielding him from the worst of the reality-bending assault, but Micah could still feel the skin of his face cracking, trickles of blood running down from the wounds that were opening of their own accord as he dried and burned under the constant attack.
