Chapter 1711: Enhanced Champions |
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The undead front had become a graveyard in reverse.
Bodies that should have stayed dead climbed over the ones that had just fallen, rotting fingers dragging themselves across scorched earth toward anything breathing with a mindlessness that made each individual kill meaningless, because the horde behind the corpse was already replacing it before the body finished collapsing.
Gorthrax the Eternal stood at the center of the advance in featureless black armor pitted by ages, the blue fire in his empty eye sockets sweeping the field with an intelligence that had nothing in common with the shambling things he commanded.
Archlich Vozen flanked his left, dark energy bleeding from his gauntlets in tendrils that found the nearest allied corpse and hauled it upright with fresh purpose.
The Drowned King anchored the right atop his rusted mount, a banner of black mist trailing behind him.
Three remaining pillars of the Covenant of Eternity, and between them, enough undead to bury a kingdom.
Elisabeth hit the front line at full stride and the golden armor she wore answered the charge.
Divine radiance erupted from her on contact, a pulse of light so dense it carried weight, and the undead within ten meters of her boots simply ceased to exist.
Bone disintegrated. Rotting flesh turned to ash that scattered before the wind caught it. The Dawnbreaker’s light treated undead the way fire treated kindling, and Elisabeth tore through the horde with the conviction of centuries spent training for exactly this enemy, her mace connecting with anything the radiance didn’t reach first, each swing trailing arcs of gold that burned long after the weapon had moved on.
"Blessed be the souls the Goddess could not save," she murmured between kills.
The undead adapted. They always did.
Vozen’s tendrils wove necrotic shielding across the next wave, dark energy layering over rotting skin in a film that ate the outer edge of Elisabeth’s radiance before it could reach the flesh beneath.
The shielded undead hit her line in a wall of bodies that didn’t burn on contact, and the Dawnbreaker had to start swinging for real.
Orianna’s vines answered before the pressure reached Elisabeth’s flank.
Massive constructs of thorn and hardened bark erupted from the earth in a crescent that sealed the gap on Elisabeth’s left, each vine as thick as a man’s torso and pulsing with the warm crimson glow of the Bloodfather’s mark that burned on Orianna’s forearm.
The Flower Queen had been creating constructs since the fighting began, but the ones she produced now were wrong for a mortal mage’s output. Too dense. Too fast. Too hungry.
A vine caught an armored undead mid-lunge and crushed it inside its coils in a single contraction, the blackened plate crumpling inward like parchment, and two more erupted from the corpse’s remains to seize the next pair rushing through.
The Reservoir fed her constructs the way a river fed its tributaries, and the Flower Queen’s garden had never bloomed this violently.
"I could get used to this," she murmured, smiling softly while watching a cluster of undead vanish inside a cage of thorns that tightened until nothing remained but wet fragments between the bark.
Iris fought five meters ahead of both of them with the sigil between her shoulder blades dim and cold.
[Torment Cycle] had been stacking since the first blow landed.
Every wound the undead carved into her skin fed the furnace inside her chest, and every hit she returned landed harder than the last, her sword cleaving through rotting bodies with a force that had no business existing in a frame this small and this battered.
The Reservoir pulsed through the bond like a second heartbeat she could feel but refused to listen to.
Every other marked fighter on this battlefield was drawing from it freely, and the difference showed just through Orianna’s vines that were now crushing armored undead like insects.
Iris’s sword arm burned and her ribs screamed where something dead had caught her with a mace she’d been too slow to parry, and the Child of Reckoning ate it all and gave it back as rage made physical.
She didn’t need his power. She’d been fighting since she could hold a blade, and every ounce of strength she carried had been paid for in her own blood.
’The Ravenclaws were Ravenshade cousins.’ The thought surfaced between kills as her eyes tracked Gorthrax across the field. ’The Covenant operated out of Ravenshade territory since forever. The gangster that took Damian...’
"Were you involved with the Ravenclaw family’s downfall?" she snarled at the Drowned King as her sword cleaved through two of his summons in a single stroke, blood and rust spraying across her face.
The Drowned King did not so much as glance at her.
"Answer me!" The next swing split an undead knight from collarbone to sternum hard enough to crack the flagstone beneath the corpse.
Nothing. The ancient lord continued directing his cavalry as if the woman screaming at him were furniture.
Iris’s teeth bared behind a mask of blood. "Fine. I’ll get my answers my way."
As she threw herself at the next snarling minion, Gorthrax finally turned his head toward her.
"Interesting... I want to study her..." he murmured. "She’s like a berserker, but her relationship with pain is so much more unique..."
The ancient undead lord recognized what was happening to her the way a scholar recognized a theorem he’d read about but never seen proven.
Every wound made her faster. Every broken rib sharpened her edge.
The girl was turning his army’s greatest advantage against itself, because the horde that overwhelmed every other fighter on this field was just fuel to her.
But she was too low level to matter in the grand scheme of things.
He raised one gauntleted hand and the advance on her section tripled.
Vozen’s necrotic tendrils shifted to reinforce Gorthrax’s push, darkened undead surging toward Iris’s position in a concentrated tide, and the Drowned King’s mounted cavalry swung wide to flank her from the east.
Three lords coordinating their forces against a single swordfighter who had attracted the wrong kind of attention by being too stubborn.
Iris’s [Torment Cycle] hit a ceiling she’d never touched before.
Her class had no ceiling, but the body housing it did, and the muscles that had been converting pain into power were beginning to burn in a way that had nothing to do with [Eternal Hunger]’s starvation or Ragnar’s dark ritual.
This was simpler. Older. The body saying what the will refused to: she was running out of road at this pace.
The bond called again.
She’d been ignoring it. The crimson pull of the Reservoir that sat behind every family member’s mark, the shared blood that Quinlan pumped through his women like a second circulatory system, fueling everything they did.
All she had to do was reach for it.
Her mind began forming the words through [Master’s Link], the request she’d been too proud to make since the bonding ceremony. But for Damian... For revenge...
’Quinlan, can I-’
She stopped.
The words died unspoken because the answer was already there, as vivid as if he were standing in front of her instead of halfway across the continent in an Elvardian dungeon.
She could see his face with perfect clarity.
That big, confident, infuriatingly charming smile.
Those mesmerizing eyes carrying just a little too much smugness for any sane woman such as her to tolerate.
His mouth would curl at one corner the way it did when he was about to say something that would make her want to punch him, and his voice would come out warm and certain and completely insufferable.
’Of course you can, Iris. Your revenge is my revenge, have you forgotten?’
’...’ Iris understood perfectly. Quinlan had lived through her terrible childhood in some twisted Soul Records simulation. He wanted justice done for Damian and her mom just as she wanted.
Still, her eyes darkened. .
The arrogance. The absolute, bone-deep, unapologetic arrogance of that man, who would give her everything she asked for.
Then the darkness cracked, and what broke through it was a grin.
Wide and crooked and genuine in a way that her face rarely allowed, because Iris had spent most of her life making sure nothing real showed through.
Because despite all his insufferable attitude, despite the smugness and the possessiveness and the way he looked at every woman around him, her included, like they were already his, Quinlan Elysiar was the man who had given her everything.
He would say yes. He would always say yes. And he wouldn’t even hesitate.
The mark between her shoulder blades ignited.
Crimson script blazed to life down her spine in lines that burned through her armor and cast red light across the undead pressing in around her, and the Reservoir that had been pressing uselessly at the edge of her awareness poured through the brand in a flood that hit her class like oil hitting a furnace.
[Torment Cycle]’s numbers shattered. The pain she’d been stockpiling, every wound, every cracked rib, every gash she’d refused to acknowledge, detonated through her muscles at twice the conversion rate.
An undead’s mace caught her across the ribs on the backswing, and the impact that would’ve buckled her a minute ago ripped through [Torment Cycle] and came back as a surge that lit every nerve in her body white-hot.
Her back arched, her lips parted, and the breath that left her was closer to a sigh than a grunt.
’What the...’
Iris then licked blood off her lower lip and shrugged.
"Quinlan..." She split an undead in half mid-stride without breaking rhythm. "By the end of the day, I’ll make you the only existing Necromancer on the face of Iskaris!"
The laugh that followed came out low and rough and breathless.
"Oh, wait."
Her expression turned crooked as she looked toward the undead lords.
"He already is, because you Covenant of Eternal Losers are nothing but grave robbing Corpse Animators! Hahaha!"
And the woman who conducted a full-on imaginary conversation with herself and a man hundreds of miles away, all the while believing herself fully sane, threw herself back into the killing.