A couple of hours passed and I couldn’t let out a sigh when the eighth wave of the Frost Wraiths was finally done… I never thought that I would get this tired after grinding. I always found that rexing, but this was a bit different from I was used to.
“Working with you sure is efficient. I never gained this much experience in a short window of time.”
“And you never will, given how useless you are. You can’t even pay for my help with some decent information.”
“You can ask anything aside from the type of monsters that are in the final section. I don’t want to spoil the surprise.”
Anything, he said… It wasn’t like I didn’t have any questions left, but it was hard to believe that he would have the answers to the really important stuff.
“You seem proud of this, then let’s check if your confidence has any reason to exist. Where can I find the Nocturath?”
“Wow… you sure decided to ask for a bombshell all of a sudden? Are you interested in who your mother is?”
I couldn’t say that I wasn’t, but I had other business with them. I just wanted to know also to avoid stumbling in their nd by accident and then getting caught off guard.
“What do you know about Nocturath?”.
“About the nd itself? Can’t say that I know much about it aside from some organizations like the Forsaken, The Veiled Court and the crimson covenant.”
“You Know more than most, did your father taught you that?”
“You aren’t going to get any information from me before giving some.”
“Hahaha. Well, you see… it is a fact that the Nocturath exists, but it isn’t a pce that you can find like the Empire. It is a nd that you can only reach after some fulfilling some conditions and it isn’t like you need to go to a pce and you will find its border.”
“You make it sound like it is some kind of pce that doesn’t exist or that keeps changing locations.”
“That is exactly what the Nocturath is.”
When Rayner brought me home when I was born in this world, he came from the West… In that direction, one could find the Elven nds, but I didn’t find any signs of vampires there.
My guess was that the Nocturath wasn’t a pce one could stumble upon by accident. It had to be somewhere you were invited. Like a secret, whispered in the wind, the nd seemed to exist in a state of contradiction: both present and absent, a phantom realm carved from the fabric of reality itself.
It wasn’t hard to imagine why. The vampires, with their mastery of ancient magic, surely wielded the power to manipute such a domain. Theirs wasn’t the crude magic of mortals, but something older, something tied to the deep and unknown. And they weren’t alone. The others who lived alongside them, hidden in the folds of the Nocturath, likely added their own knowledge to such a pce. Together, they had created a nd untethered, a shadowy refuge for those who thrived on secrecy and mystery. This wasn’t a pce you found; it was a pce that found you, if it wanted to.
“I guess that avoiding such a pce is out of the question. If one of them decided to invite me, I will find myself there rather I like it or not.”
“Oh, you understood that so easily. I thought that you would be a muscle head like your father. If you got that from your mother, she must be quite the schor, huh? Your father’s score is high priest, noblewoman. Rich merchant’s daughter, and close to royalty… I guess a schor was really missing on the list.”
I let out a sigh… he sure knew some useless stuff, like the background and origins of the mothers of my step brothers and sisters. When I thought about that, I realized that the st wave of monsters was taking their time coming, and I couldn’t help but worry a bit.
“It seems that the Frost Wraith boss is plotting something and controlling its minions. I just hope that they won’t take their time and team up with the next group of monsters “
I was pnning to use my decay arrows to make quick work of the boss wraith. If I knew that things would change all of a sudden like this, I would have leveled up Demon’s Snare up to level ten. I got carried away with Demon’s Bane. At least both of the skills are almost there and each one would grant me a new skill. I would bet that I could learn those just by using those skills on the boss. No idea if such a specific css would be useful to the monsters of the final section.
‘This moron doesn’t want to tell me the final monsters… I guess it must be that. That is why he said that it would be more fun to surprise me and there aren’t many things that I can use against them.’
All of a sudden, the temperature in the surroundings began to drop… My first reaction was to check things with Alissandra. She already had two cloaks protecting her, and they were also enchanted to provide warmth against the cold. Just to be sure, I strapped the scorching bow on Gcien’s back.
“Sorry, girl, you might like the cold, but we aren’t all fans of it. I don’t think that this will bother you that much, so endure it for a bit.”
“I think that it will be better if you tell your pet to take the little girl away… the temperature will only keep dropping.”
“What do you mean?”
“They decided to combine their forces… or forced themselves to do so. Although they are weaker, they can do this much with the help of the boss of their section.”
The monsters of the final section were finally revealed, and they were none other than ice drakes. Their appearance was exactly as one might expect, scaled, sleek, and glistening like frozen tundra under a pale sun. But something about them was off.
Around each drake, a strange aura pulsed, like a cold mist infused with a sinister energy. Shadows clung to their bodies, curling and shifting unnaturally, as if they were alive. It wasn’t just an illusion or a trick of the light; the shadows seemed to have a purpose.
Then I saw it. The shadows took form, coalescing into cws that mirrored the Frost Wraiths. Their ethereal hands flickered in and out of existence, wielding their vengeful spirits as weapons. It was as if the drakes had absorbed the wraiths’ essence, twisting it into an extension of their own lethal power. Or maybe the other way around…
“This will be hard…”
I could agree with that… it wasn’t a fusion, it was more like possession. The boss of the wraiths realized that facing us directly wasn’t a good idea, so it decided to improvise like that. This creature was supposed to be on the same level as the ice phoenix, so it wasn’t surprising that it had this level of intelligence.
The ice drakes were retively small, but all of them had a lot of magic power and it looked like the wraiths powered them up as well… all of them were using their breath to fire a powerful wave of cold toward us.
“Yeah… I can’t fight this while standing my ground. We are living.”
“You already decided that?”
I ignored and just followed Gcien, who began to run while carrying Alissandra. We were a bit faster than the possessed ice drakes, but not by that much.
“Aren’t you going to even try to stop the monsters, or even decrease their numbers?”
I ignored his question and focused on what I could do… For starters, I used Demon’s Snare to stop some ice drakes from moving, and that worked. They also burned a little, so it seemed that they got the weaknesses of the Frost Wraiths, too. I could use that.
Without hesitation, I stopped the enemies with Demon’s Snare and then used Demon’s Bane on them… the attacks exploded and destroyed their arms. It looked like they were a lot tougher than I had expected.
“Why did you stop? Go for their heads after they lost their arms?”
“I can’t. I will waste all of my mana. This isn’t efficient enough.”
Roswald looked at me as if I had said something insane… It looked like he couldn’t see things unless they happened. Just using the same strategy one or two times was enough for me to tell that they were useless. Still, perhaps I should keep using it just until I can get the new skills of the css.
However, I decided to wait for a bit until I had a decent pn to deal with the monsters. Still, it looked like we were out of time…
“Hey, we are back in the second section of the byrinth!”
“I am aware of it… Let’s use that old combination. I weaken the enemies and you will appear to finish them off while using Shadow Step.”
“I don’t think that my attacks will be enough to finish off the Ice Drakes… at least not as fast as necessary.”
“No worries. I will weaken them enough.”
After I summoned three arrows, they turned purple… I used Rapid Fire to unleash them at a single target and soon Roswald understood what I could do with the cursed arrows. The first pierced only the tip of the head of the monster, the second pierced halfway through, and the final pierced all the way.
You received 150 experience points.
This situation had the potential to give us a shit ton of experience, but we would need to take some risks.
WritingMachineGun
