Rune Seeker

Hiral swept the Greatsword of Amin Thett across in a wide arc in front of him, Chimeras literally falling to pieces where the blade bisected them. Rot of black, necrotic energy – along with Breaking – spread from the wounds, preventing the beasts from healing quickly or combining with other nearby monsters. In the fifteen minutes since he’d leapt from the wall with his doubles, preventing the combinations had become the party’s number one priority.

At the beginning, Yanily’s and Seena’s domains had taken care of most of that, the damage they did reducing the Chimera bodies to such a state they couldn’t combine. After that though? When the domains had finally faded – without the battle showing any sign of slowing down – it’d gotten a lot messier. What were hordes of relatively weak, Low-B-Rank enemies, increasingly became Mid-B-Rank. From there, the occasional High-B-Rank and even Elites began emerging.

While the party could handle them thanks to their advanced classes and powerful equipment, none of them were exactly an easy fight. Worse, it took time to down one of those monsters, letting more of the horde slip through to continue the assault on the wall.

Drahn, Gran, and Seeyela had helped turn the tide there while Seena, Yanily, and Hiral – along with his doubles – had blunted the worst of the charge. Even with how many they killed though – and the Domain of the Sun+ – there were still more, and the exhausted defender numbers continued to drop.

Down to under four-hundred, the party’s efforts had made a difference, but according to the timer in the notification window, the Hanging Gardens would still be lost in nine minutes. Did they have to wipe out all of the Chimeras within that time frame? Honestly, if it hadn’t been for Hiral alternately sharing Killing Spree+ with Seena and Yanily – and the skill’s ability to recharge them with every kill – they would’ve run out of power already. Even then, they were falling behind now that the enemies were growing stronger, and in turn taking longer to kill.

“Got another High-B coming our way,” Right said over the party chat, getting Hiral’s attention. A quick look in the double’s direction – it wasn’t hard to spot him thanks to his pillars of purple flame – and Hiral found the large, multi-headed Chimerebus charging their way.

“I’m on it,” Hiral said, mainly so Yanily and Seena didn’t think they needed to intercept it. Above all, they had to keep the higher-rank enemies from making it to the wall, though Seeyela had filled in when one slipped by and several occasions.

Rejection launched him over the new corpses in front of him, and his fingers tightened around the hilt of his sword as he looked at his next target. Already as big as a house, the hyena bowling over its own kind already had eight sets of heads on it. Four hyena and worm heads covered the front of its torso, while the others ran down its flanks – two on each side. At its back end, eight snakes reached and snapped at anything that got too close, fangs glistening with venom. Two more legs had sprung below it, bringing the total there also up to eight.

The thing really was a monstrosity. One Hiral had to put down.

Plotting the course of the Chimera’s charge, Hiral twisted in the air and planted new planes of Rejection under his feet before blasting away. Back cocked the Greatsword of Amin Thett, gravity increasing as he tethered the weapon. Unsurprisingly, the Chimera with all its heads noticed him coming, the four worm-mouths at the front puckering in preparation of its acid spit.

Even with his speed, it’d be hard to sneak past all those eyes, so Hiral threaded solar power into his runes, then darted out far to the left and back to the right. Left, right, left, right, left, right, Hiral dashed through the air, leaving a trail of himself in his wake. With dozens of himself already behind, two of the less-than-brilliant Chimera’s worm heads shifted like they were trying to pick a target.

That still left the pair in front aiming in his direction – obviously figuring out the lead Hiral was the dangerous Hiral. He’d have to dodge…

Or, would he?

Acting on instinct, Hiral added a weave of his time runes – just a touch of each, along with Dreaming – and his plans of where he would move. All at once, another dozen images of Hiral burst ahead of him, darting off in different directions.

Unlike the images he left in his wake, these ones moved – like Hiral would – but also looked far less substantial. To an idiot-monster like the Chimera, though? It was enough.

Four worm heads finally released their payloads – even though it had only been, at most, two seconds since they spotted Hiral – and the streams of concentrated acid shot in four different directions. None of them at Hiral.

Although, apparently missing him by shooting at the images counted as him dodging, with a pair of Lost Echoes forming to also charge at the monster. With enough versions of Hiral in the sky to fill the theatre where they’d fought Banst, the Chimerebus didn’t know where to look.

Or where to defend, and Hiral burst downward, Rejectionwhomping in the air.

The two Lost Echoessmashed into the Chimera’s worm-faces at the same time Hiral flashed past the back end of the monster. Reinforced with Separation, Breaking, and necrotic energy, the Greatsword of Amin Thett sliced effortlessly through where the snakes met the rest of the body. Eight serpentine forms seized above Hiral as he hit the ground – blade first – to plunge the sword almost up to the hilt in the earth from his swing.

Even as he turned, snake bodies began to rain around him, severed ends dripping with black energy, before he dashed in and under the unsuspecting Chimera. Explosions from the front of the beast had it rearing back in surprised pain, while Impact and Expansion circled his right fist as it scarred along the ground as he took one more step forward.

Twisting at the hips in a powerful uppercut – and his best impression of Right – Hiral added a suite of Breaking, Separation, Sealing, Compression, and Increase to the blow just before it struck the stomach of the unsuspecting monster.

WHAAAAM, his comparatively small fist drove into the monster as he was forced to leap into the air to reach it. Carried by the force of his rising uppercut, the Chimera folded around him, while his sensory domain told him of a cylindrical shockwave of force bursting from the top of the beast at the same time a second, ringed horizontal shockwave rolled outward. Breaking and Separation tore apart the inside of the monster, and both Hiral and Chimera rose fifteen feet into the air from the impact. That alone wouldn’t be enough to end the fight, though, and Hiral began rotating his body as he rethreaded his runic powers.

This time, Separation and Expansion extended from his foot as Rejection twisted him around in a sweeping crescent-kick that defied natural law and flipped him upside down. Black, necrotic energy traced the three-sixty arc severing the Chimera where it hung in the air. Then, back to right-side-up from the force of his swing – and before the Chimera even realized it’d been cut in half – Hiral crossed his hands above his head, claws of Separation and Rejection on his fingers.

Power flowed into his Edict of Increase as he pushed power into the concept of what he wanted to do, then tore his hands out to his sides. And ripped the two halves of the Chimera apart in a bloody shower at the same time.

Tendrils of reaching blood infected with necrotic energy trailed the front and back halves of the body as they thumped to the ground below, the heads and legs still moving. Even after all that, the monster wasn’t dead.

Good thing Hiral wasn’t done yet either.

Up went his right hand, and the Ring of Amin Thett followed, the script engraved in the crystal glowing brightly. A thought burned the Rune of Energy into the open space between the ring, but Hiral was going for more this time, once again leaning on his Edict of Increase. Wrapping the entire Ring in his will, Hiral pushed at the limits of the Annihilation of Amin Thett as it built. Higher. More. Power poured into the central ball of glowing destruction.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

He'd watched Yanily pull ambient energy in his breath attack, so why couldn’t Hiral do the same thing? Sure, he used the energy the Ring gained from kills as the spark, but this time he also hauled on all the energy from the hundreds of dying Chimeras to be the fire.

Glowing cracks emerged on the Ring – the seams where Hiral had put the device back together – and he felt it begin to shudder above his hand. Within the circle, the crackling ball of energy filled the space, shocks of it stretching beyond the limits to tear at the air.

Let’s see what you can do.

Hiral thrust his right hand down, and the Annihilation of Amin Thett unleashed its power. Previously, the beam had been a concentrated force somewhat smaller than the diameter of the Ring itself. He’d pitted it against the power of the Fallen and found it lacking.

This time, though?

The width of the beam exploded into something bigger than Hiral was tall, arcs of necrotic energy crackling across its length as it smashed into the top half of the Chimera. Silence filled the space, sound itself annihilated, before the beam lanced ahead, strafing the length of the room to the cliff face he’d entered above. The ground where the blast passed glowed a combination of melted reds and sparking black – any monsters that’d been there were completely destroyed – before a rising wall of unstable energies erupted along the line.

Anything within a dozen feet of the wall vanished in an outward pulse that simply evaporated them, and sound returned to the space with a nearly deafening BOOM.

Even Hiral’s eyes widened at the ruin stretched out before him, and he could feel Yanily and Seena turning in his direction.

“Uh…” Hiral started.

“Don’t try to tell me that was just a D-Rank mountain too,” Yanily said while laughing at the same time.

Hiral didn’t actually have a response to that as hundreds of experience notifications flashed in the corner of his vision, and energy streamed in from each kill. Killing Spree+ and Momentum were having a field day with this army of monsters, but he didn’t have a chance to look at the gains from it.

“Don’t just stand there admiring your work,” Seena said. “Don’t let them regroup!”

“Got it, sorry!” Hiral said, remembering the back half of the Chimerebus. Even without the heads there, he’d seen monsters completely regrow themselves from less. Behind him, the Ring of Amin Thett settled at his back, though the glowing seams along it hadn’t faded – Did I push it too far? – while Hiral turned to finish the job he’d started.

Except… the back half of the Chimera was gone.

Hiral’s head swiveled left and right as he looked for the damn thing. How far could it have gone? Sure, it had four legs still, but no heads, and it was bleeding waterfalls from both ends! The necrotic energy should’ve slowed its healing and regrowth, but… then… where?

“Left, Right, either of you see that Chimera I was fighting?” Hiral asked.

“You’re telling me the death beam didn’t work?” Right asked over the chat, his question punctuated with a purple pillar.

“Only on half of it,” Hiral said. “The other half should be right below me.”

“Careful, you’ve got incoming above,” Left said smoothly.

“Yeah, I saw them,” Hiral said, even though he wasn’t looking up. Mobile Artillery Spheres emerged from his Arsenal of Amin Thett, then took up a defensive position at his back. The next second, beams of cutting energy lanced into the swarm of Chimeric birds looking to take advantage of his apparent distraction. Thanks to his sensory domain, Hiral didn’t even need to turn to face them to direct the spheres while he scanned the ground for his target.

Standing on planes of Rejection, he had the perfect view for a search like this. And yet…

Hiral’s eyes narrowed as they scrolled across the battlefield. The scar he’d cut across it was still bare of enemies, like the Chimeras refused to cross the line. Circles around Yanily and Seena swarmed with monsters looking to finally put one of them down, while Left and Right roamed with The Pack to hunt down any growing threats. There were still monsters squirming, moving, fighting everywhere.

What Hiral didn’t see, however, were corpses.

With how many of the force they’d culled, the ground should be littered with them. More than that, the other Chimeras should be marching over mountains of their dead to reach Seena or Yanily. And yet, they weren’t. The ground was clear, giving the monsters open earth to stomp across.

“Left, you seeing any Chimera corpses down there?” Hiral asked. “Drahn? How about at the wall?”

“Little more worried about the living ones than the dead ones,” Drahn came back, his breathing heavy. Without Killing Spree+ – and only his domain, which had expired – he was running low on resources.

“One second,” Left said. “We just killed several. What do you need to know about the… what!? They’re gone. Completely.”

“What are you seeing, Hiral?” Seena asked, flames scorching her nearest opponents.

“Something is happening to the bodies of the ones we kill,” Hiral said.

“Same over here,” Gran said through the party chat. “Grumpy here is killing ten for every one the others up here are taking down, and we don’t have a pile of monster bits in front of us. Didn’t notice until you asked.”

“Grumpy?” Drahn asked flatly over the voice chat.

“What’s happening to them?” Seena said, ignoring the tracker.

“They getting up and walking away?” Yanily asked. “Nope, this one definitely isn’t walking anywhere without its legs.”

“Sis, you see anything?”

“Nothing that would explain vanishing corpses,” Seeyela said. “Unless they all got caught in Hiral’s new and improved death beam.”

“No way I got them all,” Hiral said, mind working while his eyes continued to search the field for an answer to the question. While he could – and probably should – get back down to helping the others, something about this was making his non-existent hair stand on end.

“Are you sure… whoa! No-legs is gone,” Yanily said. “Did he get up and walk away…?”

Since there weren’t any corpses directly under Hiral, he blasted in Yanily’s direction, Rejection causing a shockwave where he’d started. Above the spearman in seconds, Hiral looked down at the dark ground stained with Chimera blood, his sensory domain searching for any monsters moving in a direction that wasn’t towards the spearman. Nothing. Everything below him was dead-set on reaching Yanily. Then, after that, it was just dead.

Yanily had gotten far too good at what he did.

Hiral watched as the spearman cut through enemies one after the other, only those Mid-B-Rank or above lasting more than seconds. Monster after monster fell before his spear, and Hiral kept his attention on those that had fallen. The corpses didn’t get up – and they certainly didn’t walk away.

“Damn, mine are vanishing as well!” Seena said.

Hiral’s head snapped in the party leader’s direction, but something ticked at his sensory domain directly below him, and he glanced down. The bodies were gone. Yanily was still surrounded by new monsters coming his way – and Hiral absently reached down with a thread of Connection to share Killing Spree+ – and more pressing from ahead. Behind him, though, no corpses.

There had been dozens. It didn’t make any sense.

Hiral stared hard at the brown earth, as if the bodies had simply turned invisible. No, his sensory domain was telling him the corpses weren’t there.

Wait… brown? The ground had been so dark, it was nearly black.

Hiral lifted his head to look around, no longer looking for something running around and stealing bodies like a Shambling Graveyard, and instead focused on the space between his friends. Whatever it was, it had to be moving fast, and almost unseen. Which meant…

There! Like a shadow on the ground, something swept under the feet of the Chimeras in Seena’s directions. Rejection launched Hiral after it, another burst increasing his speed as he stretched out his sensory domain. Ground, Chimeras, and something else tickled his field of Rejection. Like what he touched was spongey – which made no sense for the packed earth and stone they fought on top of.

Hands to his thighs, Hiral pulled his RHCs up and took aim at the moving shadow. Piercing Shot+ and Dual Power Attack+ began forming in front of the barrels, as he watched the dark stain on the ground. The thing had to be almost a hundred feet across, but what was it?

Only one way to find out.

Three seconds passed, Hiral’s dual, RHC barrels inside another larger one made of semi-solid solar energy, and he released his triggers. The recoil from the blast jerked his arms and even arrested his forward momentum, but the blast itself tore ahead to slam into the ground. Dirt and stone geysered into the air, while a shriek-like roar echoed across the battlefield. Chimeras all around the point of impact shuddered and froze, their bodies suddenly becoming schlurping puddles right where they’d stood. And, within a second, those puddles vanished into the ground, while a mound of something else rose.

Gelatinous, dark red like old blood, as big as a hill – and shaped like one – the thing grew to over forty-feet tall. Long tentacles of the same color emerged from random locations across the body and around it, oddly reminiscent of Seena’s new domain, and then – because it needed to be freakier – mouths opened all over it.

Like the ones Hiral had seen in the defender-turned-Chimera on the wall, these mouths had curved, needle-like teeth on both sides of them, while tongues with their own mouths extended from inside. Some of them even had the weird eyeballs the tongues needed to lick since they didn’t have eyelids, then all the mouths released another bone-jarring shriek.

Unable to take his eyes from the monstrosity, View triggered, though it didn’t help him much.

(??? – ???) ??? – ??? Rank

“In case anybody missed it,” Yanily said over the party chat. “I think I figured out what happened to the corpses.”