80. The Stand (III)_Averix: Call of the Everloft (Progression Fantasy LitRPG)

  -Bhashera, Forgotten City-

  Amara



  “Into them!” Mendax roared. “We’ve got them on the run!”

  “The tide is stemming!” Lokar agreed.

  Amara saw the truth in their words. As she let another gout of flame shoot from her fingers and wrap her Scorpirex in threads of searing carmine, she saw their numbers start to dwindle. More had managed to launch themselves through the stained-glass windows on either side of their defensive ring, but each time they had been rebuffed right back – seared by Amara’s flame. She had made it her job to keep the airborne ones at bay – for the creature’s speed lowered considerably as they catapulted themselves into the air. At time she let two fireballs sail from both hands, and then returned to keep Kimon steady, watching him grow weaker and weaker with each passing second.

  She lost count of how many they’d killed – of how many scaly bodies lay gutted or charred at their feet. The experience had stopped coming by this point. Now the trial was just endless killing, coupled with the screaming of Mendax and Lokar as they fought tooth and nail to bring down their relentless foes.

  And now, finally, she could start to see the horde pull back.

  “Cowards,” Mendax spat. Then, louder: “Cowards! You tried to break us, and you paid the price. You picked off our Brothers and Sisters out there, finding them alone, waiting till they were weak and ready to give up. You waited, didn’t you? You waited till they were all alone and then you pounced on them!”

  His final rage-filled declaration was punctuated by his axe swinging out of their air bubble and clipping the jaw of a retreating Scorpirex. It flailed before him as he brought his regged foot down on its neck again and again.

  “Vengeance!” he roared to the diminishing wave. “See your brother die – see how it feels to know you can do nothing!”

  “Brother!” Lokar cried. “Please – do not leave the-“

  One look from Mendax shut Lokar up, but the same could not be said for Amara. She looked at the great beast with a sad mixture of pity and revulsion, feeling the winds buffet her hair, and slowly Mendax gradually calmed himself.

  “Whatever,” he grunted. “Not like these vermin can feel anything anyway.”

  “Hear that?” Lokar shouted back to Kimon. “The door – I- it opens! It is opening, Brother! We have done it, we-“

  But Kimon’s face was grave. His reply – fraught with doubt.

  “No, Brother,” he sputtered, wiping fresh blood from his mouth. “Not yet.”

  Amara watched his wavering eyes as they prospected the door, seeing the Scorpirex back out slowly to the swirling darkness of the city outside – as though the exterior had been swallowed by a great maw of shadow.

  Then, through this benighted portal, a saurian leg emerged.

  Thicker than the others, and with a heavier sheath of armored scales protecting it. As the body of the beast emerged, this coat of onyx-like scales glittered across its entire body like a cloak of chainmail. At the edges of its joints, such scales ended in vicious spikes that descended into two sets of webbed claws on each arm – a freakish mutation of its brethren. Its face – what could be perceived as its face through its armor of scaled thorns – was little more than a set of amber slits framed by a visor of jet-black mail. It stared, unblinking, watching the quartet of Gnolls and their Lightbringer, stalking slowly and menacingly over the bodies of its fallen kin.

  And with each movement of its unnaturally armored legs, its twin-barbed tail swept the bodies away like a whip descending on a casket of ashes.

  “What is that thing!?”

  “By Ty’Kella!” Lokar screamed, joining his brother in his moment of stunned shock.

  Amara froze with them, doing nothing but watching the impossibly coated creature thunder towards them on legs that shook the whole church floor.

  Appraisal: Success

  Morphology: Scorpirex Alpha (POSSESSED)

  HP: 80

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  She had seen monsters. She had seen evil. But this creature that eyed her with its unnerving stare – it was beyond anything she had even imagined.

  Witness the might of a true Voidspawn, Amara, her mother uttered against the backdrop of woe. Look upon this creature, and do not forget this moment.

  She felt her legs give way.

  The taunting demon of fear had returned to stay her burning hands.

  What moment? She challenged. The moment we all get fucking crushed?

  But her mother did not return her scorn. Instead, it was Kimon who rose behind them all, and even though his voice was little more than a muttered cough, they still heard him. Amara wagered even the beast inside that great mantle of darkness heard him:

  “Brothers, we have met our enemy,” he said, standing tall, gripping his staff with both hands. “And it is an abomination.”

  Amara turned back to the monstrous mass of onyx shards, and she could swear, by her mother’s voice, that it narrowed its alien eyes at the old Gnoll.

  <2 minutes>

  Kimon raised his staff and bellowed – using the winds whipping up all around him to carry his voice like a booming thaumaturge:

  “LET US SEND THIS CORRUPTION BACK TO THE ABYSS!”

  It shot forward with unnatural speed as soon as Kimon slammed his staff into the floor. Its onyx-encrusted bulk had approached their circle before Amara could even blink.

  “Lightbringer!” Lokar wailed.

  He took aim at the beast’s shoulder and his arrows went wide. The thing ducked the projectiles and sprung forward – an engine designed for murder. It opened its mouth – salivating with black bile – and bit clean through Lokar’s shoulder.

  “Brother!”

  The next few seconds flashed by like a flickering candle being snuffed out: Lokar was thrown back into the bronze idol and the beast surged forward, aiming its next strike at Kimon.

  “DIE!”

  Mendax’s axe buried itself into the creature’s armored shoulder joint and stayed there – stuck fast, drawing barely a drop of blood from the the beast. It spun with lightning speed to deliver a strike across Mendax’s chest with both its stingers, throwing him against the broken stained glass window to their left.

  It turned its attention back to Amara as its fallen prey tried to recover themselves, and she only narrowly avoided the full power of its claws as she threw herself to the ground, feeling it rake its serrated nails across her back:

  HP -8

  HP: 2

  Half damage and still lethal.

  She launched a fireball at its snarling, gaping mouth which it swallowed with ease, belching back a torrent of black bile that pooled beneath its feet.

  “Protect the Lightbringer!” Kimon howled, hurling his own bulb of air at the beast and managing to successfully repel it – doing minimal damage but sending it skidding away on its hind legs. It recovered instantly, charging right back at them.

  Once again, Mendax threw himself at the demon and was rebuffed, tossed aside by its armored mass. Lokar’s arrows found their mark at the being’s neck – it did not even swerve to avoid them. Instead, it charged on. Lethal. Focused. And ready to spear its final targets into oblivion.

  Amara felt despair cling to her heart as she felt the aerial shield begin to wither. She looked up at Kimon, his energy failing him, his nose and eyes bleeding profusely, and bore witness to his sad smile.

  <1 minute>

  The creature pressed forward, ignoring Mendax’s cries of pain as he tried to interpose himself between it and Amara, and she took in the whole situation at once:

  Mendax

  HP: 10/50

  Lokar

  HP: 5/20

  Kimon

  HP: 15/20

  GLANCE: 5/35

  Scorpirex Alpha

  HP: 50/80

  The damage they’d collectively done had been a waste. It had eaten her fireballs, laughed at Lokar’s arrows, and shrugged off even Mendax’s strength.

  But in the grip of despair, one of them still stood strong.

  Staring into the jaws of death, Kimon stepped forwards, head bowed, and placed a firm but shaking hand on Amara’s shoulders.

  “Amara,” he said, “Channel your Infernal Cloak.”

  She looked at him in confusion as, unbeknownst to his brothers still fighting the Alpha, he carefully dropped his shield till it only covered he and Amara.

  “Brother!” Mendax roared as the beast struck him down on his knees. “What are you doing?!”

  “Amara,” Kimon growled, fierce and feral, never breaking eye contact with the corrupted creature. “Do it.”

  Her eyes glazed over, feeling darkness take her again, so that she had little strength to even argue against him.

  Do as he commands, Amara, her mother whispered in her brain. It is your only chance.

  She watched the Scorpirex Alpha make its final leap over the fallen Gnolls in a dive-bomb attack that would end this whole sorry battle.

  “NOW!” Kimon screamed.

  And just as the benighted behemoth entered the Aura of Storms, its claws mere inches from her throat, she closed her eyes, summoned what remained of her strength, and channeled the spell:

  Incantation: Infernal Cloak

  The battle stopped. The whole church froze. Everything seemed suspended in a state of mass paralysis. All she knew, all she felt deep in her soul, was that she had just turned some invisible key that unlocked something within her fervently beating heart:

  Then the world vanished in a haze of roaring, raging flame.

  The last thing she remembered seeing was Kimon’s proud smile as he vanished, eaten away by the explosion that rocked the church, destroying everything within their sphere of scintillating energy.

  She watched him as he burned away, stuck in a kind of slow motion, her arm reaching towards him as his fur crisped and his flesh sizzled away to nothingness, while the monster roared in defeat behind him.



  She only dimly heard Mendax’s howl of fury and anguish as she and her companions were catapulted through the sigil door.

  As she felt herself pulled away into the darkness of a waking nightmare, she tried to reach him, called to him, and then resigned herself to crying in a mad fit of despair:

  “What about freedom?!” she wailed.

  His old, wrinkled smile only grew as the rest of his body turned to smoldering ash.

  “For you, Amara,” he said before he died. “Not for me.”

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80. The Stand (III)

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