NOVEL SIMPLE Chapter 61: Vassal Of Ur’Thul
Actually, not just three craters. Four more flaming ghouls rose from the ashes, lines of fire running along their limbs and glowing in their eyes. Like their predecessors, these ghouls darted ahead into the oncoming horde. BOOOOM! They all exploded in unison, more flames incinerating everything close.
And more flaming ghouls rising from the ashes.
Now there were six of Seena’s pets. These ones sprinted down the nearest paths, leading to more explosions lighting up the night.
Okay, now I know how Yanily feels when he calls me overpowered.
With that side secure, Hiral shared a look with Right—both of them shrugged like they were looking in a mirror—then turned his attention back to Wule and Left. If they were still surrounded…
Yanily’s Chain Lightning+ tore through the crowd around Wule and Left. Ghoul flesh popped and sizzled under the onslaught, the hungry forks of electricity crisscrossing the pack of undead back and forth to char them to a crisp. Even better—for the party—the lightning didn’t just cross from undead to undead, but also all along their bodies. Residual arcs split off from the main blast to tear up and down, shredding desiccated muscle and even exploding the occasional head.
All in all, half the ghouls on that side fell from a single use of the spearman’s powerful, upgraded ability. And it didn’t end there. Yanily leapt into the air to crash back down with Skyfall. The closest ghouls were simply vaporized by the impact, while others got thrown back, buying Wule and Left more breathing room at the same time Nivian charged in.
Shield and whip never stopping, the tank seemed to be everywhere, bashing in skulls on one side, then appearing on the other to take a hit in Left’s place.
For their own part, Left and Wule had held their ground, ghoul corpses strewn about them, their own bodies covered in surprisingly minor wounds. One ghoul managed to slip past Nivian to score a hit on Wule, but an immediate blue flash exploded out of the healer, pushing the ghoul back and negating the wound he’d just suffered. More than just negating, actually—the small injuries Left had suffered vanished in the blink of an eye. From there, Wule seemed to flow around the ghoul and bop it on the top of its head with his icicle rod.
That just left Seeyela, and as Hiral looked up, he found her dancing across the rooftops—all of them. Like Nivian, she just seemed to be everywhere at once. On a left-hand roof, she ducked a claw, stabbing one fang into the ghoul’s leg, then spun around it and drove her other fang into the back of its skull. Bamf. She vanished to appear on a rooftop three buildings away, where she leg-swept the first ghoul, needled the next with a dozen lightning-quick stabs—leaving the thing toxic green in her wake—and spun around and brought in both daggers in a pincer-strike on a third.
Hiral’s eyes widened when two moons appeared on either side of the ghoul, crashing together as Seeyela’s blows landed. The poor monster got squashed between the dual celestial bodies, while everything else on the roof similarly got sucked in at the same time. Though they managed to avoid the same crushing fate, another quick gesture from Seeyela did something, and the dozen or so undead vanished from the rooftop.
What did she do…?
Hiral got his answer when ghouls began to rain down from high above, their bodies cracking and breaking on the hard stone at the end of their trips.
“Keep an eye out on this side,” Hiral said to Right, sheathing his sword and drawing his RHCs again.
The party definitely had things under control, but he’d help speed it up. Pulling his triggers, he alternated his fire between what was left of the group on the ground and the stragglers on the roofs. The initial push of the undead seemed to be tapering off, and instead of every one they killed getting replaced by two… the numbers were dropping.
Explosions continued to ring out behind him—Seena’s fiery pets cascaded deeper and deeper into the maze of mausoleums—and Hiral dropped ghoul after ghoul in front of him. About one in five seemed to explode from the Violent End effect of his Killing Spree+, and after the third such one coated Nivian in healing gore, the tank finally turned a scowl in Hiral’s direction.
“So it is you making these things explode,” Nivian said into the party chat. “I should’ve known.”
“Maybe,” Hiral said, headshotting a ghoul trying to flank the tank. Of course that one exploded too, covering Nivian’s back in more gore. “Uh… okay, maybe not maybe. It makes you feel better, though, doesn’t it?”
“That’s up for debate,” Nivian said. “You’re taking care of the laundry.”
“Fair,” Hiral agreed, shifting his aim to his next target, but Yanily came leaping in ahead of him.
Lightning followed the spearman’s weapon as he swung it around him, the first sweep taking out the ghoul’s knees and the second removing its head from its body. Before the pieces of the undead even hit the ground, Yanily had already sprung away, his constantly twirling spear leaving destruction in his wake.
Still, the dismembered head was kind of making gnawing motions with its mouth, so Hiral took aim and pulled the trigger.
The head exploded in a sphere of tearing black energy that took two other ghouls with it.
One more explosion punctuated the night behind him, and then everything grew silent.
“Is that it?” Odi asked from where he crouched beside the pedestal. “That was easy.”
“Don’t say things like…” Yanily started, but a large section of the dry earth began to shift.
“Incoming!” Hiral said, just as the dirt exploded upwards and something burst free from its grave.
“Your fault,” Yanily said to Odi as the dirt and small rocks rained down from above, and the party moved to put itself between the new threat and the Urn.
Lifting itself out of the ground was a new arrival that, like all the other undead they’d faced, had obviously once been a Lizardman. But, unlike the feral ghouls, it wore thick armor. Black plate covered its eight-foot-tall body from head to toe, the familiar blue light spilling from between the joints and the eye socket of its helm. With its left arm, it hefted up a shield patterned after a grinning skull—more blue flames in those eyes—while its right hand pulled an etched longsword out of the pit. Wider than the average sword, it had engraved runes running along the blade, and just a glimpse of them sent a shiver up Hiral’s spine. The sword’s razor-sharp edge shimmered with the same blue flames.
(Mid-Boss – Undead – Death Knight) Vassal of Ur’Thul – Unknown Rank
“And there’s our first Mid-Boss,” Seena said.
While Nivian moved ahead to put himself directly in the Mid-Boss’s path, Hiral stared at the monster’s name.
Vassal of Ur’Thul? It’s connected to the Urn somehow.
That was all the time he had to consider it, though, because the Death Knight then lowered its shield and dashed forward. Using a movement ability almost identical to Nivian’s, the undead monstrosity barreled straight into the Grower tank, who barely got his own shield up in time.
WHAM! The impact drove Nivian back, shattering the roots that’d sprung up and wrapped his legs for support, and his feet dug divots in the ground. Getting pushed almost ten feet before he finally stopped the undead Mid-Boss, Nivian had both arms behind his shield, matching his strength against that of the larger enemy.
Shield on shield like that, though, left the undead exposed from its sides, and Yanily darted out then back in, thunder trailing behind him. With a flash of lightning, he struck for the Mid-Boss’s chest while Right circled in from the other side.
A shove, then twist-clang, twist-thunk, and all three party members flew backwards, repelled by quick movement and the power of the undead’s shield. And then, suddenly, it was the Growers who were exposed. Blue-edged sword drawn back, the Death Knight took a step towards Yanily and swung.
Still hanging in the air from being tossed back, Yanily managed to get his spear up to catch the slicing sword on the haft of his weapon. Though he managed to prevent himself from getting cut in half, the sheer force of the swing shot him to the side and straight towards one of the stone mausoleums. D-Rank body or not, hitting the solid wall of the building would still break bone and pulp flesh, but a curtain of black rolled down just before he hit. Without a sound, Yanily vanished into the black and then immediately tumbled out of another portal that had opened right beside him.
Twisting in the air, Yanily managed to get his feet back under him, and he skidded along the ground to a stop.
In the brief few seconds Hiral had watched the spearman’s flight, the Death Knight had charged back on Nivian, battering the tank with blow after resounding blow. Nivian’s thorny shield was already half-missing, and the rest of it looked like a whole pack of lumberjacks had gone to work on it. This monster was obviously on an entirely different level than the ghouls they’d just finished off.
Of course it is! It’s a Mid-Boss.
Nivian wasn’t fighting it alone, though. Scars of flame sparked off its armor as Seena hit it with Cinder, and Seeyela bamf’d in behind it. Determined to do his part too, Hiral lifted his RHCs and pulled the triggers. Somehow, through the natural course of its slashing barrage on Nivian, the Death Knight managed to deflect both of Hiral’s shots and spin around to get its shield in front of Seeyela’s daggers.
Green venom splashed harmlessly off the grinning skull, and then the depressed eyes glowed brighter.
“Look out!” Hiral shouted at Seeyela.
The eight eyes of her helmet tilted down just in time to see the mouth on the shield open and belch a gout of blue flame.
FWOOOSH! Seeyela vanished within the roaring fire, which scorched a wide cone on the ground twenty feet long and just as wide.
“Sis!” Seena shouted, her hands clawing back and forth across the air, scars of Cinder appearing on the Death Knight’s armor to match her motions. For all the good they did, the black armor appeared entirely undamaged.
“I’m fine,” Seeyela said over the party chat, and Hiral spotted her kneeling on top of one of the mausoleum rooftops, smoke rising from a burnt patch on her shoulder. “Barely,” she added.
That brutal exchange had only taken a second, and Hiral’s weapons came off cooldown for him to pull the triggers again as the Mid-Boss went back to slashing at Nivian. Twice more the sword deflected the blasts, the undead not even needing to look to bat the shots out of the air.
“Oh, enough of this!” Hiral shouted, lifting his right arm into the air. The Ring of Amin Thett followed suit.
“Death beam, incoming!” Yanily warned the rest of the party, and Hiral jerked his hand down.
Feeding the ring with his Rune of Energy, the glyphs empowered by all the ghouls the party had defeated quickly condensed into a central, full-powered ball of energy, then ripped forth. The air tore like shredding paper, the solid, two-foot-wide beam aimed to remove the undead’s head from its shoulders.
SCHWAAANG! The Death Knight intercepted the beam with its shield, the collision ringing like a gong and pushing the monster back.
But that was all it did.
After the energy from the Annihilation of Amin Thett had expended itself, the undead still stood, its shield little more than smoking from the full-power blast.