Eramith
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Book 2: Chapter 67
🕑 Added 2023-06-13 13:00:07 +0000 UTCA falling guard would have consumed a lot of mana from his shield, especially compared to the arrows they were firing considering the difference in weight alone. Their bodies completely flattened themselves when they smacked the ground, their armor denting itself and creating a loud racket. None of the guards he saw falling survived.
Some of the ones that had floated out prematurely had survived their fall, but only the earliest ones. The rest of them splattered across the ground like water balloons that refused to burst, their skin being too tough to pierce and holding itself together. The way they laid after landing though, it was clear their insides had been obliterated.
A good number of them fell upon the monsters in the courtyard like giant hail. Their bodies slammed into the creatures and seemed to deal a decent amount of damage. Most of the creatures managed to dance around to avoid the bodies but there were so many, it was impossible to avoid them all.
Felix recharged his mana as much as he could using batteries and manual regeneration while he waited for the last few Devoured to fall. Once a minute had passed without any falling guards and Felix was sure all of the scrolls had been dealt with, he flew back over the castle. The ground was completely covered in hundreds of corpses that had even destroyed most of the buildings in the courtyard.
One of them had clearly been a stable once, judging from the wreckage, another was once a barracks next to the training yard. The last had been both storage and sleeping quarters, likely for servants judging from it’s location outside of the castle itself. Felix wasn’t sure at first how to deal with the remaining monsters.
The only Devoured left were the fastest, most perceptive and smartest of the lot and even with his distractions, he had a hard time dealing with them. Eventually, he settled on doing his best to slow them down using spells. The aether was still dense enough for scrolls to work so Felix quickly created a bunch of those and littered them across the ground. All the spell did was apply a force that would pull things into them. It wasn’t nearly enough to trap any of the giant monsters left in the courtyard, but Felix was hoping it was enough to slow them down.
He resumed his distractions and managed to take out the tentacled thing after a quarter hour of persistence. Moving onto the chimera, he had to create more scrolls as the original ones he put down had barely lasted the entire fight. This time he made sure to create even more scrolls. Along with the experience gained from the last fight, Felix was able to finish off the chimera a few minutes faster. The last monstrosities didn’t last any longer though, Felix did have to recharge his own mana as well as the aether a couple of time.
He finished off the last couple of guards that were lucky enough to still be under rooves and the ones that had fallen prematurely. With all of the visible threats dealt with, Felix lowered himself to the ground and meditated just outside the front gate.
All in all he had used a total of 103 batteries in the fight. That was over 25 million mana even without considering the amount of aether used. It was more than he had ever used before but it was the only solution he could come up with and looking back, he was happy with the expenditure.
He still had 47 batteries left in his inventory so it wasn’t like he was running low. He should have more than enough for a while, unless there were another half-thousand guards in the castle itself. He was also somewhat surprised to see he had gained some levels in his profession.
Ding You have gained 10 levels in [D - Arcane] Mana Engineer (192 => 202)
Once he had completely recovered, Felix walked back into the courtyard of the castle and paid as much attention to his surroundings as possible. He was pretty sure everything was dead but in case there were still some Devoured alive, he didn’t want to be caught off guard.
Corpses littered the ground in every direction, just a few meters of space between each of them. He walked up to each of the buildings, starting with the servants quarters on the left, right as he walked in. About half of the building was reduced to rubble but it didn’t seem like there were any surviving Devoured in the remaining half. There were barrels, crates and sacks piled up in a storage room but all of it smelled awful so Felix didn’t even bother looking through any of it.
The building to the right of the main road, across from the servants quarters, appeared to be a large barracks. It had had three visible entrances, two to the main road because of how long it was and one to the sparring area covered in sand, nearest the castle.
The building had a small section in the middle that was still standing but everywhere else the roof had collapsed. There was nothing remaining inside the building of value and it seemed like all the Devoured guards had left to try and take Felix down so none of them were left inside the rubble. He was expecting an armor rack or weapons cache in the ruins but other than a couple of each lying around, there didn’t appear to be much.
The last building was a stable and only had a couple walls though, it had managed to stay mostly in tact. It seemed like the majority of the Devoured had fallen closer to the main gate so only a few had actually hit the roof of the stable. There were a few of the flying Devoured’s corpses here that had died from falling but they were too light to actually do any damage to the building.
The rest of them, Felix had finished off with his Shades. Looking through the contents of the building, there wasn’t much left at all. There were some destroyed saddles that were not for horses but rather seemed to be made for the flying Devoured Felix had initially dealt with. All the saddles had been completely shredded and looked like they had been used as chew toys for something with very sharp teeth.
There were a couple of Devoured hanging around that had survived, though all of them were crippled in some way so it was trivial for Felix to finish them off. Once he was sure everything in the courtyard was dead and there was nothing left of value, he walked up to the castle.
The castle had a large double doorway that eerily swung open as he approached. He jumped back and looked around for whoever had opened the doorway but couldn’t find anyone. Felix didn’t have any intention of walking in through the front door just yet so he ignored the self opening door and flew up alongside the castle.
Felix flew himself up to the first level and peered through the, now unglazed, windows. On the first floor, Felix saw a large open entry way flanked by pillars and terminated by an angular imperial staircase on the far wall. There were a few Devoured walking around but they were all low level and posed little threat.
Felix waited and watched as they walked in and out of the doors on either side of the room but no guards ever appeared. Once a half hour or so had passed, he summoned a shade into the room and finished off every Devoured that walked through.
His best guess was that these used to be slaves, butlers and maids because they appeared to have had little to no combat experience when they were alive. One of them carried a large kitchen knife but they didn’t seem to know how to use it in a fight so Felix assumed they were once a cook of some kind.
He circled around the building and found an empty ballroom. The other rooms didn’t seem to have any windows so Felix moved up to the next floor. Circling around, he peered into a dining room followed by a bedroom, library and a bathroom all located around the outside of the floor. He made sure to finish off any Devoured he spotted then finally circled around to the backside of the building.
This floor had a series of massive open windows that looked out over the cliff. Peering through them, Felix saw a large room with ornamentally carved pillars and beautifully ornate flooring. At the far end of the room there was a large throne sitting atop a raised platform. The entire room was lavish, beautiful and incredibly excessive in Felix’s mind.
There was only one Devoured in the throne room, unsurprisingly sitting upon the throne. The Devoured wore a large crown as well as the scraps of long thick robes that might have once been as lavish as the throne room itself. Their hand rested upon the cross guard of a longsword with it’s tip buried in the stone flooring.
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[D] King of Kroterra: Devoured (Lvl 902) .________________________________________________________________________________________
Yikes.
The king either didn’t spot Felix or just didn’t react to him so Felix decided to leave them be for now. He flew up to the last floor and looked into a series of bedrooms but only found a couple Devoured total that were probably maids considering the remains of their garments. He made sure to scour as much of the building as he could but found nothing else inside. All that was left was a stairway that led underground and the king himself.
Judging from his level as well as his position as king, Felix wanted to avoid a direct confrontation as much as possible. He made sure his Mana Shields were active then floated up to the large unglazed windows that looked into the king’s room and made sure he was a few dozen meters away from the windows.
He didn’t want to be too close in case the king tried to jump at him or something. Once he was ready, Felix summoned a shade behind the king and attacked. The shade swung outwards in an attempt to cut right through the throne along with the king’s neck. Right as the axe started to cleave through the back of the throne, the king shot up and whipped around, sword in hand. The shade’s axe had dug itself a half meter into the throne and no matter how hard Felix pulled, the shade couldn’t seem to free it.
He ignored that shade for now and instead summoned another shade next to the king. As soon as the shade appeared, the king flicked his wrist and shot the longsword towards the shade. Felix saw it coming and was barely able to launch the shade back in time so it only suffered a minor scratch instead of being split in two.
The king was undeterred though as he simply leapt towards the shade and struck out again. Felix was very ready for it this time and dodged towards the windows and away from the throne. The king planted a foot in the ground then diverted all his momentum and pursued the shade. The only reason Felix was able to barely dodge the king’s advance was that he was flying and his shade was replicating his movements.
From this brief fight alone, Felix was certain the king was easily twice as fast as he was and almost thrice as strong. There was no chance Felix was going to be able to land a strike, especially one on one so he cast a quick lightning bolt to disperse his first shade who was still stuck in the throne.
As soon as his lightning bolt hit, before he could resummon the shade, the stone work around the windows Felix was peering through started moving. A tendril of stone bricks shot out of the wall directly for Felix. He wasn’t ready at all for the attack but luckily his Mana Shield was. It struck the shield and consumed thousands of mana to stop the strike before Felix flew off to the side and the tendril flew past him.
Before he even started slowing down, a pair of stone tentacles shot outwards and tried to wrap themselves around Felix. They were far faster than he was so he had no hope of dodging them.
Instead, he summoned a shade next to the tentacle on his right then swung to the left. He, nor the shade, managed to bury their axe very far into the tendril but unexpectedly, it still managed to stop the attack. As soon as the axes struck, the tentacles recoiled and writhed almost as if they felt pain.
Felix quickly looked back into the castle, worried that the king was about to launch an attack of their own but instead found himself face to face with a blank wall. At some point during the attack of the stone tendrils, the windows had vanished, as if they had never existed in the first place.
Felix shot himself away from the castle to avoid any more attacks and ended up flying all the way back to one of the houses in the northern, wealthy neighborhood.
