Chapter 102: Illusionist’s Miasma
“Marco!” Elisa called. Marco could hear it now, if only just. Maintaining three of Quill apparently put some level of strain on his ability to maintain this place. It made sense if this was a short-term skill, and the power of what he was seeing made that feel likely. He was slipping. “We are trying something.”
A burst of arrowfire came from nowhere, catching two of the Quills off guard. Not much damage was done, but Quill scowled in annoyance at the distraction.
“Truth inside this place is mine to influence. Truth from outside can get in. Next time, I’ll have to budget power to keep enemy fire from entering. Thanks for that lesson. Luckily, nothing your team can do can do much to me, anyway. I think it’s time to end this.”
Marco wouldn’t let that happen, he decided. Unfortunately, the decision no longer appeared to be his. He tried to lift his sword arm in defense and found his arm no longer followed his commands. He was losing blood, or else Quill had poisoned him, or else he, for once, was just beaten. Whatever it was, the next backhand from Quill put him on the ground. The three clones homed in on his position, claws ready for a final strike.
“Marco! Riv is going eighty percent. Captain’s Cry!” Elisa yelled. “We are doing operation Slicing Dark.”
Memories of the battle with the bat in the cave washed over Marco as he let loose with his buffing skill. Something about it shook the space just enough that he could see his friends, which strengthened himself just enough to curl into a ball and cover his face. Quill seemed to think he had given up, and the man was more or less right. Whatever happened next was in Riv’s less-than-capable but entirely enthusiastic hands.
Gold washed over the space, which was powerless to stop the sheer brightness of Riv’s overdrive effect. Eighty percent was an awful lot, and though Riv would never be able to hit a target as fast-moving as Quill with it, he didn’t need to when the target stood as still as stone and waited for it. From inside of Quill's house, Riv’s club made contact with the front wall and evaporated the entire thing into a storm of boulders, chunks, and razor-sharp slivers of stone.
None of the fire coming at Quill was magical or system-enhanced, but it was moving so fast Marco only heard it after it started to hit the area. He suspected he would have died right then if he wasn’t completely under the protective cover of all three of Quill’s bodies, which took the brunt of the damage for him. A wave of dust obscured his vision for a second as Quill screamed in terror, then went silent.
When the dust cleared, two of the Quills were dead. One had a spike of stone as long as an arm through its head, and the other had been sliced so thoroughly through its neck by some sharpened piece of shrapnel that no amount of regeneration could have saved him.
The third Quill was alive, if not well. He fell to his knees, grasping his chest with both arms and breathing in a heavy, wet-sounding kind of way that did not bode well for his continued survival. Marco couldn’t move, really, but he didn’t really need to, either. He had a good idea of what was going to happen next.
“Hey, jackass,” Aethe said. “That’s my captain.”
She put a fully charged arrow through his head at point-blank range as Elisa looked on with grim satisfaction. In the distance, a weakened Riv gave a little cheer just before he fell to the ground. Marco smiled with bloody teeth as he joined Riv on the ground.
Elisa had plenty of power left for healing, having not used all that much during the fight. Several minutes later, Marco was more or less stitched up, though he felt sore in a way he was sure wouldn’t clear for days. Whatever hope they had of looting more of Quill’s house evaporated as the Riv-inspired structural instability and gravity of the situation caught up with it, leaving the entire structure as little more than a pile of rubble.
Marco and his team took a short breather on the hill between Quill’s house and the town, looking down at the wreckage of both while the shakiness of worn-off adrenaline steadied out.
| Conquest Complete! You have defeated a captain far above your level, of a modified, specialist class, and one possessing an armada of sorts that you also defeated. An exceptionally large upgrade has been applied to your equipment. Even with the overflow of this upgrade flowing into the general quality of your ship, a sufficient amount of improvements to your baseline equipment have been made as to stretch their ability to hold it all. Until the equipment is in some way upgraded, all subsequent power stored in it will be credited at a much reduced rate. As a temple controller, Quill’s defeat also means something different that the system itself does not entirely control. Check the individual notification related to your claim on his temple for more details. If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
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