Eramith
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Book 2: Chapter 64
🕑 Added 2023-06-08 13:01:01 +0000 UTCFrom his memory of flying over the castle, Felix knew the general layout. There was a main structure which was just a few meters from the edge of the cliff and appeared to contain many floors, judging from the windows. The outer wall juts out of it on either side then surrounds the courtyard in front of building, on the north side, away from the cliff. Within the courtyard was mainly a road but next to the road there were a few buildings, a garden and a large sandy area. He also knew there were flying Devoured who’s levels were in the mid 600s. Within the courtyard, he had seen humanoid Devoured in shiny steel armor, griffins, chimeras, and tentacled monsters he couldn’t identify.
The first thing he wanted to do was sleep, but it had only been a few hours since he last slept right before attacking the camp. Felix decided he would finish a few other things before he let himself sleep. First and foremost was getting a better and more up to date picture of what he would be facing. Felix prepared himself with the same method he had used with the camp, but this time prepared a spell to launch himself far away at the first sign of a colored gas or other unknown danger. He knew he would have to deal with the flying creatures, but he figured they would be easy in comparison to the gasses that had completely surrounded him and made it impossible to blow away.
He flew low to the ground at first with a dim light and slowly ascended the stone that led up the backside of the cliff and towards the entrance of the castle. Once he was just a few hundred meters away from the castle, before he was even able to see it, Felix heard a group of metal greaves running towards him. Before they got into range, Felix shot straight up into the air and poured mana into his light spell, flooding the ground beneath him in harsh white light. He was hoping it would blind them but considering they didn’t actually have eyes, he wasn’t holding his breath.
As he ascended into the air, Felix heard a series of very faint twangs. In almost an instant, he saw multiple explosions of wood just a short distance from his face and felt his mana being yanked into his shield. He quickly started to dart from side to side and forwards and back to make himself as hard to hit as possible but he only managed to make a small percentage of them miss. He quickly realized his light was perfectly following his movements so all they had to do was aim a dozen meters in front of it. As soon as Felix realized this, he tried to keep his light still while he darted around as evasively as he could, but every time he moved, his light jerked slightly giving him away. He realized he would never be able to get it perfect in the next few seconds so instead, he moved the light around as rapidly as he could while darting around himself. He also moved the light further behind him so it wouldn’t illuminate him.
Ultimately, he managed to make most of the arrows miss, but there were still a fifth or so of the arrows that struck his shield dead on, and eerily directly in front of his head. He figured he should be able to maintain this amount of mana expenditure though so he shot himself forwards and over the castle. It didn’t take long for the flying dinosaur creatures to notice the bright light flying over the castle and for them to start flying over. The flying dinosaurs flew faster than Felix did in a straight line, but Felix was much better at quickly changing directions in the air and overall, his reaction time seemed to be faster. Unfortunately, the combination of the arrows, the flying Devoured harassing him and the low light, Felix was having a rough time trying to avoid everything.
The flying Devoured would dive at him and he would duck to the side only for another to already be there. He would barely avoid that but it would result in a couple of arrows splintering against his shield. Overall, he wasn’t making much progress and couldn’t really focus on scouting what was beneath him. The only minor silver lining was that a handful of the arrows that had missed Felix had actually hit a couple of the flying Devoured, though he suspected they hadn’t lost much health.
His available mana was dwindling as he consumed more than he could regenerate. Unfortunately, that meant he couldn’t just keep playing with these Devoured until he was good enough to dodge everything. The archer’s were too far away for Felix to worry about them at the moment so instead, he waited for a flying Devoured to dive at him and this time, he dodged upwards. As soon as it’s gaping maw passed under him, he reached down and tried to get on top of it but dodging had pushed him too far away. He tried again, this time using a force spell to push the creature into him at the same time and he pushed himself down to it, except he missed again, it was just traveling too fast.
Changing tactics, Felix dodged to the side this time. He wouldn’t have to push himself as far because it’s beak was long and thin, so it reached high up above itself but didn’t extend very far to either side. He braced himself for impact, grabbing hold of it’s wing as it collided with his body and latching himself onto it. The creature started spiraling with the added weight on it’s wing but it was just large enough to not be plummeting into the ground.
Felix crawled onto its back and locked his legs under it’s wings to keep himself steady. The creature tried to flail about but Felix was holding tight, so instead it dove towards the edge of the cliff. Felix whipped out the axe and started swinging down at it’s head. He managed to sink the blade of the axe a few centimeters into it’s skull but failed to find anything vital. Before the creature could smack it’s rider into the cliff face, Felix bailed and shot himself back upwards into the sky.
He found a new target and waited for it to attack, then with marginally more grace than before, he mounted and latched himself to the creature. This time, instead of swinging at it’s head, Felix started hacking at the thin tissue that made up it’s wing. He found it almost trivial to cut through in comparison to it’s head and even had enough time to hack halfway through the arm supporting it before he had to bail off the creature. He was hoping he had disabled it’s ability to fly for at least the near future. Part of him hoped it was for much longer because he had never seen the Devoured heal from anything, but he would be happy with being left alone for the next few hours so he could scout.
All in all, there were just over a dozen flying Devoured taking him almost an hour to disable them all. On some he mounted, he had managed to fully sever the wing, others he had disabled both wings but with all of them he was happy to settle with just disabling one of the wings if he had to. Once his gruesome mission was complete, Felix returned the air and resumed his scouting operation over the castle with far less to worry about this time. He resumed his evasive maneuvers with him and and the light moving randomly in different directions causing only a small number of arrows to hit his shield. He would have liked it to be none, but he couldn’t complain now that his mana was gradually going up instead of down.
Getting a better less distracted look at the castle, with light this time, Felix was able to spot what seemed like a few hundred Devoured that he classified as guards due to their uniform equipment. In addition to the guards, there were a couple dozen or so random creatures, including the chimera, griffin and tentacled monstrosity he had spotted last time, roaming about. The guard’s levels were in the low to mid 600s while the various creatures sat anywhere from 700 to 800.
Felix identified the guards as Kroterran royal guards and assumed the creatures were later additions from Erolan’s exploits. His main reasoning being that he didn’t think a tentacled monstrosity belonged in a castle courtyard. He wasn’t sure about the flying creatures he had just systematically disabled but in the end it didn’t matter. He would likely need to kill them all anyways.
He didn’t spot anything new in terms of the buildings but he did spot movement through the unglazed windows of the main structure. From what he saw it looked like it was just more guards, but he didn’t get a good enough look to be sure and he couldn’t stick around any longer. As he flew over, the guards had just continued to pour out of one of the buildings in the courtyard and taken aim. By the time he spotted movement within the main building, he was starting to rapidly lose mana and saw arrows everywhere around him. He decided he had probably seen enough for now so he shot himself north, back over the hill leading up to the castle and found himself an empty and mostly intact house to rest in.
Felix slept for just a few hours, his body apparently not in need of any more, and immediately went through his daily routine. It hadn’t been quite a day since he had last done it, but it helped him think so, he did it anyways. Afterwards, he got started with the training he considered the most urgent, learning to properly use his axe, Eretheas. There were too many times in his fight with the general and the army of Devoured surrounding his camp where Felix almost screwed or even killed himself because he didn’t know how it worked. His plan for now was to not only figure out how it worked, but get as familiar as possible with using the shades, as well as test their limits.
He had come up with an idea for training that he was proud of. He hopped up onto a nearby roof, flew a few meters into the air, then summoned a shade on the ground next to him. Next he started running on the air but felt silly when he almost immediately realized he could just fly normally and the shade would follow. It didn’t need it’s feet to hit the ground because that wasn’t how it moved anyways. Spotting a small group of Devoured about a kilometer away, Felix shot himself towards them, shade in tow. He was careful in making sure the path was clear for the shade so it didn’t get caught on any buildings or walls then engaged the Devoured using the shade alone.
He made sure to provide a constant supply of mana to the axe so the shade didn’t dissipate but had to take a few moments to figure out how to prevent another from spawning. He eventually figured out a lot of the axe’s functions could be controlled by simply willing it, one of the benefits of a soul bond. Felix slashed forwards at absolutely nothing as his shade cut into the side of a book wielding Devoured. He spun around and swung the axe over his head, doing his best to stop it with force since he didn’t actually hit anything. The shade on the other hand cut deep into the shoulder of a Devoured wearing leather.
It didn’t take long for Felix to, admittedly awkwardly, deal with the small group. Afterwards he flew up, lifting the shade out of the streets and flew out to find another group. The biggest issue for him at the moment was that he wasn’t actually hitting anything which meant his axe and the shade’s axe could fall out of sync. The shade would hit something and it’s axe would slow down but Felix’s would just keep going. It wasn’t hard to resync, simply holding the axe in a particular pose caused the shade to try and replicate it, but in the middle of the fight it caused the shade to perform some awkward swings. He started using force to slow and even stop the axe but he needed to swing with enough force to actually strike so it was impossible to stop the axe without wasting huge amounts of mana.
He settled on simply resyncing as often as possible and paying attention to where the shade’s axe was, instead of where the one in his hand was. The second issue he encountered just a few Devoured into the day but had a much harder time figuring out. As he tore through the Devoured with his shade, he was almost hit with one of the Devoured’s spell casts from behind him. He was so focused on the shade and what it was doing that he was completely losing track of what was around and a danger to himself.
Unfortunately it was nearly impossible for him to split his focus without something being lost so he simply settled on protecting himself with Mana Shields all around. He got much better at alternating his focus and even got to the point where he could switch back and forth fairly quickly, but he knew it wouldn’t be enough for most of the threats in the castle.
A few hours into his training, he started summoning two shades instead of just one. At first he found it nearly impossible to coordinate the shades, causing them to accidentally strike each-other multiple times. After a few hours, he was starting to learn some tricks though. He had to split his focus even further to pay attention to both of his shades and himself, which caused everything to suffer at first. The upside was that the shades were always right next to each-other so it was more like his focus was split two and a half ways instead of three. Unfortunately, he knew he was going to have to learn to have the shades far away from each-other and still be, at least vaguely, aware of their positions and situations.
Resigning himself to it, Felix started summoning the shades on either side of himself, far apart from each-other. Almost immediately this time, he realized the solution was to simply do what he had been doing with the Devoured from before, predict and dictate their actions. It took him just an hour to get to a point he was overall happy with. He would look towards one of the shades and memorize where the Devoured were around it then predict their actions. Looking towards the other, he would move them both such that the Devoured engaged in similar enough ways allowing him to deal with them in sync.
It wasn’t perfect and both Shades were consuming a steady stream of mana to counteract all the hits they were taking, but it was enough for Felix for the time being. Looking down at the fights, if the Devoured didn’t know he was there, Felix knew they would assume the shades were psychic, reacting to enemies they couldn’t even see. Though he knew the Devoured didn’t have thoughts nearly that complex, or possibly didn’t even think at all.
