Duskbound 1: A LitRPG Adventure, page 23
[Kinetic Charge has advanced to rank 4.]
No time for hesitation, he thought.
The spear shot forward, many times faster than normal, and buried itself deep in the back of the wolf’s throat. The wolf jerked in place once, then went still. Woozily, it shook its head, but there was none of the ferocity it had displayed just moments earlier. It took a hesitant, staggering step, then a second one.
Come on. Die. Just fall over dead. This fight is over. I pierced your brain.
But that didn’t happen. With startling quickness, the wolf’s neck muscles twisted and it slammed its face into a tree. The impact jolted Velik free of where he’d wedged himself and hurled him to the ground, fresh gashes across his body and his spear left behind in the wolf’s tongue.
Velik rolled twice to absorb the momentum and came to his feet. The wolf hadn’t pursued him, hadn’t moved at all from where it was leaning its flank against a tree twice as tall as it was. The tree groaned against the weight, but held. “How the hell are you still alive?” he asked the champion monster.
In response, it stuck its tongue out to reveal his spear, then very deliberately dragged it across its teeth until the haft caught and the weapon was pulled free. Looking Velik directly in the eyes, it bit down with a crunch, then spit the two pieces of the spear out.
Son of a bitch.
[Mending] was a powerful enchantment, but Velik wasn’t sure it could fix that. Maybe if he recovered both pieces and splinted them together, it might regrow a connection, but that wouldn’t matter if he couldn’t win this fight. And to do that, he needed a weapon.
A new phantasmal spear materialized in the air next to him, but rather than direct it with his mind, he reached out and grabbed it. With his other hand, he pulled out a healing potion, popped the cork, and swallowed it. Immediately, his wounds started to close.
“Ready for round two?”
Torwin scratched lazily at his cheek and considered what he was feeling. He’d folded [Mana Sense] into [Ranger’s Lore] a long time ago, mostly as a way to give himself a heads up when monsters used skills that relied heavily on mystic, but it served a secondary purpose that rarely came into play.
Some people built whole classes around finding stuff like this, with detection skills that had ranges measured in miles. His version went out maybe fifty feet and was partially dependent on his line of sight. He could sense flickers of mana in his peripheral vision, but it was only when he focused on it directly that he could sort out what he was seeing.
And here, in an incredible stroke of luck, he was seeing what appeared to be an apple the color of blood made out of solid crystal. “What do you do?” he asked the fruit. “A point or two to a stat, perhaps? Or something rarer, maybe knowledge to boost a skill or ease a merger? Well, whatever it is, I’m sure someone will pay quite a bit for the privilege of eating you.”
He plucked the apple free of the tree and spent a few minutes scouring the area, just in case there was a second one. It wasn’t that he expected to find it, not as rare as these sorts of treasures were, but it would be criminally negligent not to look. As expected, the fruit was entirely unique.
Whistling a jaunty tune, he pulled the compass back out and oriented himself. Wonder how the kid’s doing. I was kind of expecting the signal to shift as soon as it got dark. Maybe whatever he’s hunting is giving him some trouble.
If it were Jensen out there, Torwin would be rushing toward the next target at top speed, but he trusted Velik to handle himself. Besides, Torwin had already killed three champions in one day, which was impressive enough by anyone’s standards. Velik could have this one. Torwin would be looking for a place to sleep in a few hours anyway, and leading up to that, he certainly wasn’t trying to pick a fight with a champion elite in the dark.
Hundred thousand decarmas in loot just today. Easy money. This might be the most profitable contract I’ve ever seen. And to think, I only took it to give Jensen a job he could handle.
The compass drew Torwin ever eastward, but he was in no hurry to chase it down to its source. No doubt, the monster would be dead long before he ever got close.
45
The phantasmal spear in his hands lacked the reassuring weight Velik was used to. It was easy to compensate for, but it also served as a stark reminder of just how fragile his makeshift weapon actually was. The only saving grace about the whole thing was that his counterpart was nowhere near full strength.
How it wasn’t dead was a mystery. Velik was sure he’d scrambled the monster’s brains, but somehow, it was still upright. Neither was anxious to attack, not after so many injuries. The healing potion was doing its work, but at a much slower pace than the system-provided ones. Maybe they weren’t as overpriced as he’d grown to believe, instead simply being far too powerful for the use he’d been putting them to.
While the potion slowly knitted him back together, he was happy to wait for the wolf to make the first move. It might eventually recover itself, but he doubted it would heal as fast as he was. Time was on his side—he’d be in better shape and there was a chance of Torwin showing up to help soon.
Much as it rankled him to admit it, [Apex Hunter] had been right when it warned him that this monster that wore his name was stronger than him. He was probably smarter, but that wasn’t bridging the gulf in their abilities. Worse, he suspected there were at least two more skills he hadn’t seen it use yet. Hopefully, they were both passives that contributed to the monster’s overall combat capabilities and not attacks it hadn’t felt the need to demonstrate.
The wolf made the first move. It still swayed on its feet, but it started a seemingly-drunken stumble that quickly morphed into a clumsy run. Getting struck by one of those flailing legs would probably break bones, so Velik quickly leaped out of the way. The trees couldn’t really stop the wolf, but they slowed it down enough that it had a hard time bringing its size and weight fully to bear.
When it did manage to close the distance, Velik slashed at its face with his spear. It struck the snout and immediately shattered, not slowing the wolf in the slightest. Mentally cursing, he called on [Phalanx] to create four more spears and flung them at the wolf’s eyes. There weren’t any good weak spots, not unless he wanted to try repeating the maneuver that had gotten him lodged in the monster’s mouth. Without his real spear to help, he didn’t see that working out so well—not that he was willing to risk it anyway.
How do I kill you? he thought as he formed a new spear.
He kept ahead of the wolf, mostly because it had suffered a traumatic brain injury that should have already killed it. The fact that it was on its feet at all felt like a cruel joke. That it could not only move, but kept fighting, made Velik wonder if some god had a personal grudge with him. Whatever the cause, he couldn’t deny that the monster was still a massive threat.
[Phalanx] was his only means of offense, but it wasn’t really meant for that. The spears were supposed to ward off blows from multiple sources, not penetrate heavily-armored monsters. He’d been using it wrong since the day he’d gotten it in the hopes that he could force it to merge with his actual combat skills, and that wasn’t working. Without the earring boosting his mystic stat by fifteen points, he wouldn’t be able to so much as scratch this monster.
Slipping through some thick branches to put another tree between him and the wolf, Velik materialized another spear. [Kinetic Charge] was the only way it was getting through anything, and even then, only if he shaped it into what was essentially a six-foot-long needle. Poking tiny holes was the best he could do. The spears didn’t even have the decency to survive the pinprick.
Short of merging a skill in the middle of combat, again, his best chance at surviving was to reclaim his broken spear. Half a weapon was better than what he was currently using. The problem was that, while he was keeping ahead of the champion, he wasn’t really putting enough distance between them to circle back around. He was also vaguely aware in the back of his mind that he was well outside the boundary of the wolf’s domain, but it continued to pursue him anyway.
There was no escaping then. Offense was out as long as the best he could do was throw [Phalanx] spears up between them. [Kinetic Charge] was quickly wearing him down, and all [Apex Hunter] had to say about the fight was that he’d been an idiot not to run the second he’d spotted the wolf.
If I can’t get away from it and I can’t get around it, there’s only one thing left to try.
The healing potion had been working on him for a few minutes now, and he was as close to full strength as he was going to get. It was time to be bold. He dodged around a tree, pivoted hard on his lead foot to circle the trunk, and darted past the wolf, coming so close that he actually wove between its legs as it reacted to his sudden change in direction.
As he’d hoped, the tree being there prevented it from spinning around and snatching him up in its jaws. He’d even accounted for the possibility of it kicking at him with its rear legs and managed to dodge that. He was ten feet past its back end and silently congratulating himself for his daring risk when the wolf’s tail slammed into him.
Velik saw it coming just in time to throw himself sideways and soften the blow. It still blew him off his feet to sail fifty feet through the air. He narrowly missed clipping a tree on the way, not through any skill or foresight on his part, but thanks to blind luck, then struck the ground and bounced twice.
He rolled to his feet, shook his head once to try to get some of the blurriness out of his vision, and scrambled forward as best he could without running into something. At best, he had seconds before the monster caught up with him, and he couldn’t afford to waste a single one.
Unsure if he was going the right way, Velik took off running at full speed. The sun had fully set by this time, and even with the blow he’d just taken making it hard to focus, the darkness hid no secrets from his eyes. The sound of crashing trees behind him let him know that the wolf was coming after him and how far back it was—not as far as he would have liked, but maybe far enough.
There!
Without slowing down, Velik threw his body into a no-handed cartwheel and snatched up the top half of his spear. The shaft was only two feet long, its end a bundle of splinters with cracks running up through the wood. It probably wouldn’t withstand the rigors of combat, which meant he had, at best, one final shot with it. It needed to be a good one.
He looped around the next tree and saw the wolf coming for him. Blood seeped out from between its teeth and splattered in great blobs to the carpet of dead leaves and churned earth beneath it, and little rivulets stained its black fur from all the pinprick strikes he’d given it. He’d definitely hurt it, just maybe not enough to give him the opening he needed.
One thing he’d learned was that [Kinetic Charge] was more versatile than he’d thought when he’d first picked it. His weapon wasn’t the only thing he could build up energy behind, though doing it to his body put an uncomfortable amount of strain on him. Discomfort beat death, however, so when he started charging at the wolf, his half-spear gripped in his hand, his every step felt like he was straining against invisible hands trying to hold him back.
He watched the muscles in the wolf’s chest and legs tense as it shifted its weight to lunge at him, teeth bared. It wouldn’t make the mistake of letting him back through those obsidian shards without tearing him apart again, and he knew it. Even if he could somehow trick it and slip between its jaws, he didn’t think half a spear was going to cut it.
So, when he leaped, he aimed higher. Empowered by [Kinetic Charge], he flew forty feet into the air. The wolf, slowed from its many injuries, reacted with relative sluggishness. Had Velik tried this at the start of the fight, it would have picked him out of the air, chewed him up, and swallowed him. This time, it was too slow.
Its neck flexed as its head snapped up, trying to keep track of the rapidly approaching [Duskbound] human. Even wounded, it almost got him. A fang slashed across Velik’s leg, slicing deep and knocking him into a spin that ruined his aim.
One chance. Don’t screw this up.
His body completed the first revolution and the wolf’s face came back into view. Velik’s half-spear was out of position to strike, and without being able to use his second hand to help control it, he struggled to fix that problem. Without thinking, he activated [Phalanx] and created a phantasmal shaft that reached up and twined itself around the broken remnant of his old spear.
On the second revolution, he was ready. He thrust the spear forward with both hands and released every bit of [Kinetic Charge] he was still holding onto. The spear sank into the monster’s eye, all the way past where it transitioned into conjured material, halting about five feet back. That thing has to be scraping the back of its skull. It’s dead. Please, be dead.
Velik slammed bodily into the wolf’s snout, rebounded into open air, and fell thirty feet to the ground, where he lay still and stared at the dark shadow looming over him. Come on. Die. You’re dead. Where’s the system message?
The wolf’s face peered down at him, one of its crimson eyes ruined and weeping black blood. It took a hesitant step forward. Then, without warning, it toppled sideways.
[You have slain Velik the Black Fang (champion elite, level 44).]
[You have taken a champion seed from its former owner, Chalin.]
[Champion seed’s current reserves: 0/270.]
46
Fetching the remains of his spear out of the monster’s ruined eye was Velik’s first task. Unfortunately, the phantasmal shaft he’d constructed out of [Phalanx] had shattered into motes of light, leaving the tangible, physical portion buried out of sight. That was why, after drinking another healing potion, he was standing on the dead wolf’s face with one arm buried up to the shoulder in gore while he blindly groped for the weapon.
Thank Morgus this shirt has [Mending] on it. It would never come clean without that.
His hand brushed against something hard and slender enough to wrap his fingers around. With a sickening squelch, he pulled on it and slowly retracted the spear. Its shaft was even more battered, probably six inches shorter from all the chunks of wood that had broken loose. The head was still in good shape, albeit dyed black with monster blood.
This, on the other hand, might never recover, even with [Mending].
Velik didn’t have the decarmas to replace the spear, and he was days away from anything remotely resembling safety. [Phalanx] was his only defense, and while he was confident that he could kill monsters around his level with the skill, taking on elites was another story entirely. It would be faster to slink back home, run all the way down to the city, fence the champion seeds he already had, buy a new spear, and run all the way back out here than it would be to try to kill enough monsters to earn the decarmas himself.
He hoped it wouldn’t come down to that. Velik hopped down, gave the wolf one last, searching look, and strode away to find the other half of his spear. He lined them up together, placed a straight stick next to the break to function as a splint, and used a ragged strip of cloth to tie them all together. Given how fast [Mending] normally worked, he figured he’d know if it was working in an hour or two. It’d probably take a full day to actually repair the damage, but he’d feel a lot better just knowing that the magic could fix things.
In the meantime, he rested his back against a tree and looked at the champion seed he’d taken from the wolf. The words of the system message raised more questions, but gave nothing in the way of answers.
[Champion Seed: Used to grow a champion elite monster to guard a specified location. Requires mana to flourish.]
[Champion: Velik the Black Fang (level 44).]
[Current Owner: Velik]
[Current Reserve: 0/270]
What does it mean? Does Chalin create the champions and name them? Did he name this one after me? And why does it have my class as part of its name? That can’t be a coincidence. It definitely used two of my class skills in our fight.
“Morgus’s hairy balls, that’s a big wolf,” a voice said from fifty feet away.
Seriously? Where were you half an hour ago? Velik mentally demanded. He glanced up and saw Torwin standing there, his bow held next to him and his other hand on his hip. Frowning, he peered at the corpse and said, “Level 44? How the hell did you ever kill that?”
“Obstinance and luck, mostly,” Velik said. He pulled himself back to his feet. “I was kind of hoping you’d show up and help.”
“I would have if I’d known you were fighting something like this. I figured I was pretty close when the compass shifted directions, and I wanted to see what it was that had it wiggling around like a rent girl passing by a freshly docked ship. Followed your tracks the rest of the way in.”
“What tracks?” Velik asked blandly. He knew he didn’t leave anything as mundane as footprints behind when he walked, not with [Apex Hunter] in his skill roster.
Torwin just winked before turning his attention back to the wolf. “Shame we don’t have the time or storage capacity to properly harvest this. Level 44 has got to have some good stuff in it.”
“I’ve never bothered.”
“No? Lot of money to leave behind, but then… I suppose you’d have no one to sell any materials to or process them on your behalf, never mind transporting them. Still, something this high a level ought to be worth taking a few things.” Torwin circled around the corpse, stopping at the teeth. “Those’re interesting. And… uh… that’s a big hole in the tongue.”
Velik felt Torwin’s eyes on him and was suddenly acutely aware that his clothes were soaked in not only blood, but saliva. “I told you, obstinacy and luck.”
“So it would seem,” Torwin chuckled. “But don’t sell yourself short. A kill like this takes a great deal of skill and raw power.”
Do I tell him about the name? Would that make him suspicious of me?
