Alice Angel of Mercy

We regrouped and waited for the enemy groups to arrive. I was listening to Bill as he filled me in on what the different undead did while I watched notifications appear, as my prior group made their way safely out of the dungeon. Relieved, I made mental notes about what we were to fight. Ghouls are a bit stronger than a normal person and eat flesh. Because of this, their jaws are hinged in such a way that they open wider allowing them to take bigger pieces of you. They have an elongated tongue that is coated in a poison that slows their victims. Ghasts are a smarter, stronger version of ghouls. They tend to be the leaders of ghouls and their poison is stronger and causes paralysis. Banshees are weak in body and strength but have ranged ‘scream’ attacks that cause debuffs. Stitched Horrors are all over the place depending on what parts were used. The only constant is they are highly resistant to magical attacks.

The messages I received showed the dungeon’s hesitancy. Contradicting orders would appear one after the other. It seemed at a loss that we, or more likely I, survived. Although, nothing changed and in the end all the groups were still coming. Out of everybody, Frigus seemed to not know what was going on. She rejected, very politely, to connect to my interface and had wondered off to the side of the path. She was patting a tree with a forlorn look on her face. I watched her patting the tree for around ten minutes and cursed ‘Emo Teen’ for being unreliable. Did he only have crazy women at his beck and call? I had tried talking with her a few times but she was either crazy or the most socially awkward girl I have ever met. Even the name of the male teen that brought her here was never said. He was either ‘His grace’, ‘His eminence’, or ‘Great one’. The names coming out of her mouth always changed but the reverence never faltered.

The earth reverberations were getting bigger and bigger. They would be here soon. The one thing the dungeon did do right was time it so they all arrived together. I had started casting as soon as I felt the ground shake. I was summoning help to make up our numbers. ‘Flesh Devourers’ to be exact. I had to ask James about what some of my summons could do and he filled me in on a few before I settled on these. They were tiny maggots, no bigger than an inch in size. They were some type of magical monster that were made of rocks and crystals. Their name came from their flesh colored bodies and the fact that they ate anything.

A dozen portals appeared around me as I finished casting. They flew out of them and hovered around me. Their size and shape made them resemble cut up fingers. Fingers that had circular jaws with blood-red crystal teeth. Their teeth acted like whirling buzz-saws. Unlike their appearance they could fly faster than arrows and burrow through a fully grown tree in seconds. I could feel their hunger as they started to swirl around me faster than my eyes could follow. They wanted to find flesh and I had to use my mental force to hold them back from killing us all. I did not expect to get so many. I was expecting two or three at most. I was pretty sure there were at least a dozen from my mental connection. Still, it was not as hard as I thought it would be and I wondered if I should summon something else but gave up the idea as it seemed too risky.

Frigus refocused on them, walked over and, like a snake striking out, snatched one out of the vortex around me. I sucked my breath in as I saw her hand enter into the chaotic area of flesh eating critters and was wondering if I had time to regenerate her hand before the combat but found her hand unharmed a second later. She held the Devourer as it tried to escape her clutches, a weird smile on her face. She petted the thing as if it was a puppy as it wiggled trying to eat the fingers that gently caressed it. She looked into the mist and absentmindedly tossed the captured critter back to its brethren.

She stared into the mist well before I heard the ghouls chittering coming out of it. After a minute, I could see human sized patches moving in straight lines down the path. It looked like they held weapons but the mist made it hard to tell the type. The two banshees showed up in the trees. I could only make out their silhouettes but even so I could tell that they were obviously female by their huge breasts. The fact that they didn’t just topple over and fall out of the trees was a testament of this world’s magic. But neither the banshees nor the ghouls were what was causing the earth to tremble. I could see a huge mass slowly moving behind the ghouls. Its body was colossal. Its upper mass snapping branches as its eight legs moved it onward.

I aimed my bow. We all agreed that I would target the banshees first. In my eyes, they posed the greatest risk since James and Bill were both close combatants while Frigus was an unknown. She seemed powerful just from the last battle but judging from my interactions with her she was unpredictable. She claimed that she could not do anything when asked but that she would pray for me so we left her out of our plans.

I attacked first. My ten mini-arrow barrage shot into the banshee’s silhouette but it faded away and reappeared on another branch a foot away. Cursing, I sent a few devourers into the mist and the battle was on. Female screams could be heard above us and like listening to a band from hell at max volume, my ears began to ring and my head began to pound.

‘-10% to dexterity’

‘-10% to perception’

Appeared beside everybody’s figure in my display and I found the shapes in the mist were indeed less distinct. I had nothing to fix debuffs and I cursed myself for not having the time to learn at least some of the basic spells to fix them.

The ghouls came in formation. There weren’t hundreds like the wights but they were armored and were using tactics, giving me a greater sense of pressure. Bill was making some comment about their manly parts rotting away and falling off but when a few were about to break rank and charge at him, a voice from behind ordered them back into the line. Bill frowned. I saw him take out a potion and down it. His metallic skin took on an oily luster before he charged into their line. James was following close on his heels. I had two tendrils loosely attached to each of them while I kept two close to me for defense. ‘Live and learn,’ I thought as I shot at the other banshee. My barrage should have hit but again she shifted her location. I smiled. The arrow was just a diversion this time and a few little specks appeared in front of her. The holes in the mist the devourers created from their movement, made them more obvious.

For a second nothing happened and then in slow motion she fell out of the tree. In response, the remaining one’s wailing increased in volume and the perception debuff on us increased to 20%. I saw a sixty second countdown timer appear next to the dexterity debuff. I watched Bill bend a little as he crashed into their line. James, like a well scripted play, used Bill’s back as a launching platform to leap over them to get to the leader. Frigus stood a little behind me and didn’t seem to be doing anything. She just watched the action as if there was no danger. Meanwhile the Stitched Horror shambled toward our fight. Even with the debuff to perception, it was not very hard to make out its general details. It looked like a giant tick with ‘Skin’ that was made up of a patchwork of thick animal hides and insect chitin. Its skin was covered in bumps. Its legs were thicker than I was tall and had multiple joints making its gait seem unnatural. It moved unhindered toward the line and I targeted it with the last nine devourers.

I now had multiple targets for the devourers. On top of that, I was silently casting heal on my group from all the damage they were taking and shooting my bow at the screaming woman. I felt my headache intensify as I tried to multitask. The arrow I shot had ended up in a tree a foot away from her. My vision blurred as the devourers shot at her. The banshee turned to mist as they shot at her. I expected her to be unharmed since the arrow missed but when she reformed she was clutching her arm. As the nine devourers I shot at the gigantic Stitched Horror got close, the bumps along its skin opened. Neon green rays shot out and the devourers disappeared one by one. As they died I felt the backlash, leaving me a little dizzy while I was unharmed.

Bill had been surrounded by a group of ghouls with swords that were hacking at him. Spear wielding ones were moving in to take attacks of above the other ghouls’ shoulders. The potion he had taken was displayed on my screen with a countdown timer. ‘Slippery Skin’ fifty percent chance of attacks sliding off armor negating damage; time remaining four minutes thirty three seconds. Even so he was taking damage. Minimal amounts had been accumulating due to his thick armor and metallic skin , even though he was undergoing a barrage of attacks. His wounds closed and his health was almost back to full as my spell ended. Just from watching him fight the last couple of times, I got the impression that he was holding back.

I could not see James but I saw his health go up a little bit when I cast. While he was close to full it seemed to be more due to him not taking damage than from my spell! Was distance an issue? It hadn’t been like that when I was practicing but then I had not been trying to do so many things at once. Still, the fact that his display was foggy and now my healing wasn’t working at full capacity indicated something else was hindering my magic.

My ‘Minor Heal’ normally heals around fifteen points of damage. While I am in a dungeon it had been healing for six times that amount due to ‘Power Amplification’ and with ‘Holy Aura’ it doubled again. That made a huge difference and changed an average spell into a great one that healed a hundred and eighty points per tendril. When I tried healing James with two tendrils he should have healed for three hundred and sixty points. Instead, I only managed to heal him for half that. Luckily his heals were in the four digits. I could not tell what the numbers were due to the blurriness of my display but I could at least make out that much.

The problem was that the ghouls were too organized and covered for each other. As Bill swung his hammer, three or more ghouls would move to block it; minimizing the damage he could do. Now that they had him surrounded a few broke away to attack me. I glanced behind me to see Frigus still just watching. “Seriously? Could you lend a hand?” I shouted at her.

She looked startled but answered, “Of course, Milady.” She then walked up to me and before I could even tell how she did it, grabbed Pumpkin, and while shaking her said in a cold voice, “stop being so lazy”. Then she tossed pumpkin into the oncoming ghouls. She looked at me. “Anything else you need, Milady?” she asked. A pleased smile appeared on her face as if she just did something great and was expecting a reward. I was pissed. That was my pet she just got killed! I turned to see if I could somehow save Pumpkin and saw her slowly flying through the air in a lazy arc. As she came down, the ghouls had their swords ready to strike her down and make a quick snack of her.

Just as I was trying to figure out how to save her, her fluffy hair began to move. It grew outward and she began to look like an unshorn sheep. Just as she came into striking distance all her hair shot out, embedding into all the ghouls. With a squelch, those delicate fluffy hairs pulled out every one of their bones one by one. Half a dozen ghoul skins fell to the ground while the bloody bones were reassembling into a new beast. It was a nine foot tall, multi armed skeletal monster. Between all the blood and flesh that clung to the bones, I could see Pumpkin’s hairs twinning around every bone. My anger was replaced with shock. This monstrous bloody bone thing was my cute pet?

Pumpkin raised its head, opened the skeletal jaw and let out a mighty … ok not so mighty… squeak that was barely audible. I could see her main body nestled inside the skull when she did that. Then the skeleton sprinted to the closest ghoul. Soon another skinned ghoul fell to the ground and the skeleton grew, became denser and a few inches taller. This kept repeating and while some of the ghouls hit her not much happened other than a few broken bones that were quickly replaced. Those that got close enough to hit her ended up being deboned soon after. My mana began decreasing as Pumpkin grew larger and larger. I could feel Pumpkin’s happiness as her bone collection grew.

She swept through the ghouls. It did not even matter if they surrounded her. Hairs would just shoot out in all directions, dispatching anything close. She was towering above us by now. I just watched her in disbelief until the last of the banshees gave another scream bringing me back to what I was supposed to be doing. I went back to shooting at the banshee with my bow and my remaining three Devourers aiding my now terrible shots. It took me three minutes to finally land a killing blow and even then I thought it was more luck than skill since by then my perception was down by forty percent. I just let Pumpkin play with the ghouls while I was doing that. Her adorable squeaks sounded weird with the disgusting noises of bones being ripped out of flesh and the thuds the Stitch Horror caused as it moved ever closer.

We were now in good shape numbers wise. I got a notification of the Ghast being killed. Not that I saw it happen but I knew James had gone to fight it. The XP I got for their kills was only one or two but Pumpkin’s kills gave me the full 45 XP for each ghoul. That on top of all the XP I got for healing put me close to leveling. But, we had two remaining issues. The first was that my mana was draining away at a rapid pace now that Pumpkin was so enormous. I was not sure what would happen when it hit zero. Would she disappear like a normal summons? I hoped not. I have gotten use to her being around. The other issue was the Stitch Horror which, from the noises, was now fighting James. I could see his health dropping as he took hits. We needed to help him or he would die

I moved to join the main fight but Bill was faster as he ran forward to help James. Frigus slowly walked behind me and I soon left her behind. As I moved closer to the Stitched Horror, I realized that my pace was slowing, the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end and my legs trembled. I wanted to flee as far and as fast as my feet could take me. I took a step back and then another. It took me that long before my mind started to make sense out of what was going on. Was it giving off a fear effect?! Well it was called a horror, it was just that I never thought about it since nothing I read ever mentioned it. I quickly switched my aura from ‘Holy’ to ‘Calmness’ and let my tendrils reform into a dome. The urge to flee, that I was feeling, faded away. I expanded the area of my dome so everybody was under it.

The ‘Calmness’ aura, unlike all the other auras, was actually clear. It did have a light soothing scent though that helped to calm anger, aggression, fear, and so on. The scent varied from person to person based off their personal tastes. Not that anybody other than myself seemed to be affected by the Stitched Horror’s aura. I felt a little sheepish and quickly reversed back towards that monstrosity, not very confident on how we were going to stop a thing that was the size of a two story building. The only thing going for us at this point was that the agility debuff was gone and the perception one was back down to ten percent with thirty seconds remaining.

As I got closer, I could first make out Pumpkin attacking the Stitched Horror. Her bone construction now towered over fourteen feet. It was still six feet shorter than the Horror. The real difference was that it was four times that in length making her look much smaller than she would have otherwise. Of course, compared to Bill or James she still looked sizable. I saw James had somehow climbed onto its back and was stabbing into the bumps as they opened. Bill had charged to the right side of it and was taking big swings at the leg joint he was closest to. From the distance, mist and the perception debuff I was having a hard time seeing any finer details or what the horror was doing in retaliation. James kept glowing green before he went back to normal.

I could see Pumpkin better since she was closer to me. She had put a fist through its side and her hairs had invaded into that opening. Sadly, because of the form of her attack, she was stationary allowing it to attack her multiple times. She got hit by one of its legs knocking her a few inches to the side. Sending pieces of bone flying. Then dozens of green rays shot out of the bumps that ran along its skin enveloping her in an eerie afterglow. I could not feel any pain or anxiety from our link so I concentrated on healing everybody. Something that was much harder now that I needed to keep the ‘Calming’ aura up. I also kept taking pop-shots at the bumps since it closed them every time I did. I could not tell if my arrows did any damage but one less beam was probably a good thing.

We kept this up for over fifteen minutes before my magical energy ran out. I had warned them prior but they did not want to retreat. As my magic ran out, Pumpkins giant skeletal frame simply collapsed. It was already pretty mangled from all the blows she had taken. Broken jagged bones could be seen jutting out of the pile. Still, she left giant holes that oozed a viscous fluid all along the Stitched Horror’s side. Her attacks had yanked out internal organs and crystals with every attack. The damage she had inflicted was easy to see. I could still feel our connection but she lay there helpless at its feet. I was going to rush up when I saw Frigus walking toward the Horror. She was heading toward pumpkin at a sedate pace as if she was out picking flowers.

The dozens of beams that had been hitting Pumpkin split up and hit Frigus and me. She acted like they did not hurt, which I can now tell you that they hurt like a bitch, and continued to walk leisurely. As the beams hit me, a green aura surrounded me. It felt like I was being squeezed by a giant hand as it seeped into my skin and dimmed. I could feel my life energy fading away with it; a quarter of my health vanished. ‘+1% resistance to Necromantic spells’ and ‘+1 Pain resistance’ flashed before my eyes. So it was using death energy, no wonder my health simply faded. Life vs death, they naturally countered each other. I found it hard to catch my breath and I staggered. How was everybody else taking those kind of attacks over and over?

Frigus simply walked over to the skeletal remains, picked up the giant skull with one hand, shook it until Pumpkin fell into her other hand, and turned to leave. The Stitched horror hit her small body with its beams followed by a massive leg that sent her flying. She shot off and slammed into a tree off to the side with a resounding crack. She fell still holding Pumpkin. Her cloak covered her so I could not tell the extent of her injuries but the way she bent upon impact made me think her spine must be broken. People tended to not bend that way naturally. I ran over to at least do basic first aid and once my magic recovered enough, cast a “Light Heal’ but by the time I got there she was already standing up as if nothing happened.

“How are you not hurt?” I muttered in disbelief but she still answered me with, “I am a head priestess of the sixth level. My god would not allow such things to injure me.” Her voice as calm as ever. Other questions popped into my head like what God gave indestructability? How many levels could a head priestess have? Was it six, ten, a hundred? Why did she not glow when she was hit by the beams or was I in too much pain to notice that?

I heard a resounding crash and I saw Bill had shattered the last of the legs on the right side causing it to lisp and crash to one side like a sinking ship. James had gouged out the bumps all around him and hung onto one as it smashed into the ground. Hanging there he pushed off barely avoiding the antennae that were now attacking him. He was barely dodging and he took a few blows to his chest before he got a better foothold. Both Bill and him had taken damage but still hovered a little below half because of potions. I saw Bill downing at least two potions during the fight.

Bill had moved to attack its head now that it was not mobile while James moved to stab into its neck. They did this for five more minutes before the thing shuddered and the stitching began to expand and glow bright green all along seems. It grew brighter quickly and before either of them had a chance to back off the Stitched Horror exploded in a blinding flash. Notifications of an XP reward sounded and I closing my eyes to check my display. The first thing I noticed was Bill’s figurine had gone dark and a four minute countdown timer had started.