Rune Seeker

“Left, Right, I’m going to need you back here,” Hiral said, sliding between the growing number of monsters and the researchers he was charged to protect.

“Go,” Seena said via the party chat to the doubles. “Hiral, you think you can hold off those monsters while we deal with the Infested?”

“I was just going to ask if you could hold off the Infested while I deal with the monsters,” he replied, pulling both triggers at the same time.

Searing bolts of Impact slammed into a monster on each side of the street—one spider and one monkey—and both stumbled back from the blast. The spider’s white carapace was fractured and broken, and its health bar sat at about twenty-five percent. The monkey, on the other hand, had fared even worse, the bolt tearing straight through its gut and leaving it with barely a sliver of health.

“Don’t think they’re Elites, but I still can’t one-shot them yet,” Hiral said, weapons already moving to his next targets while Right and Left dashed past him at top speed. “Right, take the spiders. Left, you’re on monkey-duty.” His best attempt to pair his doubles up with the enemies their weapons would be most effective against.

Hiral hit another spider and monkey each while his clones reached the front line, but that was the last of his free shots, and the monsters began their counterattack.

From windows and doors, even over roofs, dozens of the monsters crawled to join the fray while the sound of crackling lightning echoed behind Hiral. Part of him wanted to turn around and assist his friends—or at least check on them—but with all the monsters in front of him, he’d have to trust they’d take care of things.

And… maybe he’d been a bit overconfident in his earlier remarks, as the number of monsters was still growing.

No time for that. Focus.

Hiral blocked out the majority of the stimuli from behind, leaving just enough to be aware if the Infested made it past the others, and turned his attention ahead. Left, true to his name, danced between the monkeys on that side of the street, the Dagger of Sath trailing its ever-present stream of water and exploding with cutting force when he struck. Further, the double was using his Wing of Anella both to move faster and leave frozen monkey appendages where he passed.

Right, on the other side of the street, hammered the spiders with carapace-shattering blows while he weaved between them. Even if the blows didn’t outright kill them—usually—the sheer impact rattled them around, scrambling their insides within the hard shells.

Even pitting the doubles against their best match, though, the sheer number of monsters would quickly overwhelm them—and Hiral—unless he gave them the breathing room they needed.

Focus, he told himself, taking a deep breath.

With that breath, time slowed down in front of Hiral. The monsters almost froze in the air, while one of Right’s pillars of purple flame lazily crawled towards the sky. The direction of feet and fangs seemed to drift ahead of the monsters, like an echo coming before the motion, while their barely perceptible changes of weight and balance told the story of where they would go. Hiral’s sight, his hearing, and the flow of air across his skin all became one sense again, like they had in his first battle against one of the Barbed Swamp Snakes. The flow of battle unfolded before him like a written story on a rolling scroll.

Within his mind, shimmering energy drew the rune he’d seen on the wall of the tunnel as he’d entered, understanding tickling just below the surface, and then he flipped the rune upside-down. The imagined rune burst into glowing sparks inside his head, manifested on his chest, and crawled over his shoulders, then down his arms to his RHCs, while the singular sense he’d formed went into overdrive.

That sense touched, just briefly, on the most dangerous threats to his doubles—four spiders and six monkeys—and his RHCs followed immediately behind. Pulling the triggers ten times, nothing happened, time seemingly paused like it was, and then the trance he’d forced himself into popped like a bursting bubble.

Searing bolts of Impact exploded from his RHCs in impossible succession, all ten emerging in a sudden barrage, to almost simultaneously smack into his targets. The attacks cracked carapace, punched holes in fur-covered bodies, and even sheared limbs clean off, while a small counter started climbing in the corner of Hiral’s vision.

His eyes went briefly to Killing Spree stacking up, but the backlash of whatever he’d just done hammered into the side of his head, dropping him to a knee. The pain faded almost as soon as it came, and he saw a new notification window waiting for his attention, but he ignored it for now. More importantly, his RHCs showed a cooldown of almost twenty seconds remaining before he could fire them again.

Still, his barrage had already made a difference in the immediate fight, with the downed monsters leaving an opening for Left and Right to strike through. Since the beasts were Low-D-Rank, and didn’t appear to be Elites, the doubles’ first priority wasn’t killing them. Instead, they worked through the group, crippling and disabling whatever they got close to, and only going for the kill if it didn’t come with any risk.

Right dodged a spear-like spider leg, then weaved around the strike to land an Impact-empowered fist where the monster’s appendages met its body. Four limbs cracked and bent horrifically from the force of the blow, but Right was already past, vaulting over a biting attack from another spider. As soon as he landed, he dodged to the side to avoid a second bite, then brought his other fist up and over to crash down on the spider’s back like a hammer. Purple flames exploded out of the punch, dealing even more damage to the spider, while Hiral tossed a focused wave of Rejection at another monster leaping at Right’s back.

His double spun down low under the now flying spider, like he’d known Hiral would do that all along, and tore into the next pair of monsters.

A quick look in Left’s direction showed him making short work of any monkey daring to get too close to him. Between the decisive strikes from the Dagger of Sath that outright killed or left fatal injuries, and the enfeebling hits from the Wing of Anella, Left had a circle of broken or dead monkeys all around him. The only threat was…

Hiral gave a yank with his Rune of Attractionon the pair of hurler monkeys stepping onto the edge of the roof above Left, jerking the two monsters to the side. Having had all their attention on Left and Right, the pair toppled off the three-story roof with a surprised hoot, then crunchedto the solid street below.

But there were more where they came from; the roofs on the whole left side of the street filling with monsters. Even as they hefted rocks in their hands, a thumping sounded from the opposite side of the street. Hiral didn’t need to look to know what was coming, but he did anyway, spotting a trio of the Ghost-Web Barricade Spiders lumbering out of alleys.

At least my RHCs are off cooldown again, he told himself as he raised the weapons—first at the hurler monkeys on the left—and started pulling his triggers.

In Yanily’s words, the hurler monkeys that didn’t seem to have a name even to Hiral’s View were squishy. Aimed well, one bolt from his RHC completely pierced one monkey and slammed into the one beside it, downing both with a single shot. Two, four, six monkeys fell in under three seconds as Hiral gave them his full attention, but sheer numbers were their advantage.

Arms whipping around like slingshots, the hurler monkeys launched a salvo of snapping rocks at the doubles below. Spinning and dodging, Right sidestepped an almost impossible number of rocks, while Left did a similar job simply with small shifts of his body and a well-placed flaming wing, but neither of them were able to dodge everything. One rock finally grazed Right on the shoulder, throwing off his balance, and another hit him in the calf, tearing at the flesh and leaving a leaking scar of glowing smoke.

His feet settled under him as he grimaced in pain, actually backhanding another rock out of the air in an explosion of purple flame, but then he was forced to leap to the side again. The Ghost-Web Spider’s spear-like leg tore another long gash along the side of Right’s gut—spilling more solar energy—and two other spiders moved in for the kill.

All of this happened in the corner of Hiral’s vision. His attention was locked on Left, who’d taken more hits than his other double, and he pulled his triggers. One Bladed Frenzy Monkey who’d managed to finally get a hold of Left doubled over as the bolt of Impact punched through its gut, while the other literally lost its head to a critical hit.

Left ripped his arm free from the headless monkey and slammed his Dagger of Sath into another monster who charged in and tackled him, sending them both tumbling to the ground. The monkey’s back detonated in a shower of gore from the dagger’s explosive force, but that still put Left on the ground as other monkeys frenzied in.

Hiral dropped two before they ever got to his double, but there were simply too many—until Right arrived. The pugilist leapt into the air, scissor-kicking a pair of monkeys on the way by, then dropped down and leg-swept three more. Hiral pulled his triggers twice more to punch holes into a line of monkeys moving in at Right’s back, outright killing three and wounding that many more again.

Between his Impact-enhanced fist and the strength provided by his Meridian Line, Right bought Left the few crucial seconds he needed to get back on his feet, and the two doubles fought back-to-back against the circling monkeys. While they were holding their own for the moment, Hiral was forced to turn his attention to the now unoccupied Ghost-Web Spiders.

Without Right to keep them busy, a dozen monsters were already skittering up the road and straight towards the researchers. Hiral’s RHCs, while effective, would never be enough to kill them all before they arrived. No, he needed to slow them down first. Quick-stepping over, he put himself directly in the path of the small army charging his direction.

He holstered his RHCs back on his thigh-plates as almost a hundred carapace-covered legs clacked across the stone road, then raised both of his hands in front of himself. Solar energy flooded into his Rune of Gravity and his Rune of Decrease, the area directly in front of him shimmering slightly as small pebbles and stones floated into the air. There was no way he could cover the whole street with the power—at least, not at D-Rank—but he did manage to get an area twenty feet wide and twice that deep.

Spiders charging at him with murder in their eight eyes suddenly floated up into the air, weightlessness taking hold while their legs uselessly scrambled to reach for the ground. One second, two, and he caught most of the smaller assassin spiders, though holding them there wouldn’t solve his problem, so he weaved in a quick burst of his Rune of Attraction.

Almost like he’d created a weak version of one of Seeyela’s Gravity Wells, his pulse of Attraction pulled all the spiders to a central area near the back of his weightlessness field.

Then, completely cutting off power to both of his runes, Hiral thrust his right hand into the air. The Ring of Amin Thett followed the motion, rising above his head. Within the center of the ring, a single rune scarred the air as it formed, crackling energy like lightning bending it in on itself until it formed a core of power. At the same moment the clumped-up spiders hit the ground, Hiral jerked his arm forward, and the nearly full-powered Annihilation of Amin Thett roared forth.

The beam made a sound like thousands of sheets of paper tearing at the same time and lit up the street like the noonday sun. White carapace and stone alike provided little protection; the shaft of light sheared through the mass of tangled spiders without slowing, along with one of the barricade spiders coming up behind. As big and strong as it was, the death beam simply removed most of its torso, leaving just the eight legs on either side to fall inward against each other.

A line of glowing, melted road traced the trajectory of the blast, all the way down to where it pierced through a building and then out of sight. With its energy depleted for the moment, the ring settled down behind Hiral’s back again, and he reached for his RHCs to continue the fight, though he’d just used a huge chunk of his solar energy with that last tactic.

But it was worth it; the Ring of Amin Thett had crushed even the barrier spiders' powerful ranged defense.

Yanily was right. It really was a death beam.

I'm not sure what's more horrifying, the death beam or the fact I just thought Yanily was right.

“Hiral! Incoming!” Seena shouted into the party chat, panicked.

Hiral let his sense of perception balloon out again.

Without his hands even getting to his weapons, Hiral spun and leapt to the side of the researchers, a Rune of Rejection appearing beneath his foot. Pushing off the air like it was a solid surface, he rebounded at an angle in front of Dr. Benza and the others at the same time the Infested shot towards them like a lightning bolt.

No time to get weapons out, Hiral crossed his arms, pouring power into his Rune of Rejection in front of them, and unsummoned his doubles. The Infested’s sword hit the rune practically glowing in the air like a shield, but it wasn’t going to hold without him pushing more power into it. Instead, with the force of the blow already shoving him in the opposite direction, Hiral used Foundational Split.

Left and Right burst out of his sides at the same time the Infested’s attack completely overwhelmed his shield of Rejection and sent him hurtling past the shocked researchers. Luckily, they weren’t the only ones surprised by the desperate maneuver. The Infested suddenly had to deal with a fresh pair of doubles attacking it from both sides.

“Changing it up,” Seena said as Hiral’s feet skidded across the stone, though he used another pulse of Rejection behind him to slow his momentum. Nivian blurred and stretched past him at the same moment, rushing towards the horde of spiders and monkeys coming from behind. “You get to deal with sword guy for a while.”

As a barrage of fireballs shot past him, explosions and waves of heat swelling behind, he smoothly drew the Emperor’s Greatsword from his back.

“Sounds good to me,” Hiral said, solar energy solidifying the blade beyond its broken middle while Left’s Banner of Courage formed a dome of glowing energy.

Then, with Runes of Rejection beneath his feet, he leaned forward and launched himself at the Infested.