Explorer of Edregon

Vin didn’t even have time to scream before the tip of the ranker king’s sword connected with Lumel’s chest, slicing cleanly through the front of her thick robes and striking her chest point-first.

But before it could stab more than a finger’s width into her chest, the entire sword froze in midair, as if the Gods themselves had grabbed it by the hilt.

Vin nearly cried in relief as he recognized Lumel’s Dimensional Lockdown spell at play. He didn’t know how she’d managed to cast the spell so quickly, but presumably, she’d had the runic formation already prepared within her core before warping down here in the first place. Naturally, he’d told her about how the ranker king had thrown his sword at him during his escape attempt, so she must have expected something similar to occur.

The ranker king actually blinked in shock at the sight of his sword hanging in midair, with little more than a small trickle of blood soaking into the front of Lumel’s robes to show for his attack. Before he could react, his sword vanished in a flash of purple as Lumel shoved it into her Dimensional Pocket, and then she grabbed the three Earthers, vanishing without a trace in one final purple flash.

The ranker king merely stood there over Vin’s body, his face unreadable as he stared at the now-empty space the Earthers had occupied moments ago. After a few seconds, he frowned, turning his focus back on Vin. “It would appear I underestimated the capabilities of one skilled in spatial magic. An error I will not be making a second time.”

“She is pretty good,” Vin chuckled, deciding he’d spent long enough on the ground. Silently, he cast Binding on one of the ranker king’s feet and the roof of the keep, praying that would buy him a split second for his escape attempt.

“I suppose that means I have to ensure above all else that you do not escape as well,” the ranker king said, reaching down and grabbing Vin’s neck so fast he barely saw the man move. He wasn’t squeezing hard enough to choke him, at the very least, but it was clear Vin wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon based on his vice-like grip.

Realizing his Binding was now useless, Vin quickly scrapped his first plan and erased the spell. The ranker king was without his sword and his focus was on him, which meant it was time to turn back to his original plan. Grinning despite the hand wrapped around his throat, Vin threw together a different runic formation, flooding it with mana before the ranker king could try and knock him out or strike him again.

Without warning, gravity surrounding the two of them flipped on its head, and this time, his opponent didn’t have a way to anchor himself to the roof of the keep. Vin and the ranker king shot into the sky, falling higher and higher as the wind whipped around them.

“What is your plan here?” the ranker king asked calmly as they fell upwards, his grip not wavering in the slightest as the ground fell away above them. “Nothing you do will make me let go of you, and I am strong enough to survive a fall from any height. This is futile. Give up.”

“Oh, man, I hadn’t considered that,” Vin said, trying to sound like he was genuinely contemplative as they shot through cloud after cloud on their way toward the heavens. “Well, when you put it that wa—Self Destruct!”

Vin dumped as much mana into the spell as the runic formation could hold, and the resulting explosion was more powerful than anything he’d ever cast until that point. The flash of golden light that blasted out of his body kept him in one piece as his divine boon saved him from himself, but the ranker king didn’t have the same level of protection.

For the first time, Vin heard the ranker king shout out in pain and rage as he took the full force of Vin’s empowered Self Destruct rightto the face.

Yet to his shock, when the wind whipping past them blew away the smoke, it revealed a horribly charred and burned warrior, staring daggers at him with his grip still locked firmly around Vin’s neck.

Uh oh… That’s not good.

“I grow tired of your magical tricks!” the ranker king roared, increasing the pressure on Vin’s throat and making it both impossible for him to suck in air and partially cutting off the blood to his brain. “I will lock you so deep within the dungeon you will never see the light of day again! You will aid my people, as I have ordered, or you will die!”

“You know… I promised myself… I’d never… do this again,” Vin wheezed, barely managing to get the words out with the ranker king’s hand clasped around his neck. Already the world was growing dim, and he figured the only reason why he hadn’t already passed out was almost certainly because of his high endurance and Survivor title. “But for you… I’ll make… an exception.”

Reaching up with his left arm, Vin clamped his own hand around the ranker king’s wrist. It wasn’t quite the same as a hand, but it was close enough. With a brilliant flash of blue, he commanded his golem hand to clench down with the force of all the mana contained within his arm, his strength enhanced even further by his Artifact Extraordinaire passive. There was a single, horrifying second where the ranker king’s high-level body resisted, before his magic won out.

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With a sickening crunch, Vin pulverized the ranker king’s wrist in an instant. In that same moment, he placed his feet on the man’s stone-like chest and kicked off with every ounce of his strength, even casting an empowered Decay at the man’s wrist just for good measure with his other hand, praying the concentrated death mana would be the edge he needed for his plan to work.

The ranker king’s hand tore free from his obliterated wrist, and the leader of the rankers roared in genuine pain as the two of them were sent flying in different directions.

“You can’t run from me!” he shouted as Vin fell out of his altered gravity and began plummeting back toward the ground, the ranker king instead continuing to shoot farther and farther upward with every second, blood spilling everywhere from his torn-off hand. “I will find you! And when I do…”

The wind whistling through his hair was too loud, and the distance between the two of them grew too far for Vin to make out precisely what the ranker king was planning to eventually do to him. He wished he could just keep that spell up long enough to send the man into outer space, but already he’d been forced to cancel it now that he could no longer see the man beyond the clouds. Vin wanted nothing more than to celebrate his narrow escape from the ranker king, but he wasn’t quite out of the woods just yet.

Despite having been torn from his body, the ranker king’s hand hadn’t loosened its grip around his neck in the slightest.

Choking and gasping as he failed to get any air into his lungs, Vin desperately tried to claw the steel-like hand off his throat as he plummeted toward the ground. His golem arm flapped about limply beside him as he fell, every ounce of mana within it completely spent for the moment. His own strength, matching that of the pinnacle of humanity back on Earth, wasn’t able to do a damn thing about the ranker king’s hand locked around his throat.

Sure wish I had my divine boon right about now… he thought, spinning around in the air helplessly as he kept clawing at the severed hand. As the world continued growing dim and he failed to make any progress, he finally shouted down that primal urge in his head telling him to rip it off with his own hands, instead turning to his spells. He couldn’t think of a single one he could use to get the hand off his neck, but he did have one that would buy him some more time.

Thank the Gods I can cast spells manually, he thought as he threw together the runic formation and all but shoved his mana into it. As Replenishing Breath activated, Vin let out a magical sigh of relief as his lungs were suddenly filled with air once more, despite the fact that his airway was functionally sealed shut. He was still actively choking, which was a far from pleasant sensation, but at least he wasn’t at risk of passing out from a lack of oxygen.

If the ranker king had only gripped slightly tighter, he would have fully cut off the blood to my brain, and I probably would have died for real… Scary thought.

Looking down, Vin blanched as he realized the ground was approaching very quickly, and he hurriedly cast Slow Fall, saving himself at the last second before touching down on the roof of the keep. He wanted nothing more than to lie down and kiss the stone roof, but the ranker king would only be a few seconds behind him, and he did not want to see how the man was going to react once he landed.

Assuming his claim that he could survive a fall from any height was accurate.

Darting forward, Vin quickly cast Dimensional Sheath on his petrified elderwood door, not wanting to leave his impromptu shield behind. That done, he sprinted over to the end of the keep, leaping off and casting Redirect Gravity once more. Keeping that and Replenishing Breath active at the same time wasn’t easy, but he hadn’t dumped so many attribute points into his focus just for fun. As gravity flipped around and sent him flying off toward the west in the direction his friends were planning to meet up, he heard an explosion erupt behind him. A quick glance back showed that the roof of the keep had partially collapsed as though it had been hit by a meteor, and dust and rock were raining down everywhere. The ranker king had to have hit it with enough force to smash straight into the rooms underneath, which was a small blessing as it meant Vin didn’t have to watch that cold stare for a third time as he went flying by.

Lumel knows to warp the three missing Earthers over to the rendezvous point by the goblins’ wall, which means I just need to focus on getting there in one piece, he thought, ignoring the shouts from underneath him as he shot over the heads of a few thousand rankers. The last time he’d escaped via this method he had made sure to angle himself up higher in the air to draw less attention to himself, but this time, he was on a bit more of a timer. If he didn’t make it to his friends before he ran out of mana and Replenishing Breath wore out…

Well, he was going to try hard to make sure he didn’t have to think about what would happen.

Figures I can’t even drink a mana potion like this, he grumbled in his mind as the world shot by under him. He was taking a risk keeping his spell active for so long as he was burning through his mana shockingly fast, but he figured it was still safer than trying to make the journey on foot while dodging rankers on the ground. The keep wasn’t perfectly centered in the fragment, which meant he only needed to travel for a couple of miles.

Luckily for Vin, he wasn’t flying so much as free falling sideways, and gravity pulled people along fast. In barely any time at all, he spotted the edge of the fragment and the mass of a few thousand people stealthily jogging along it, and he angled himself for the front. He attempted to put himself down gently with Slow Fall, and he did manage to cut his velocity a good bit, but the spell failed halfway through as he officially used up the last dregs of his mana, which meant he slammed into the ground with enough force to knock what little air he still had in his lungs out of him.

“Vin!” Shia gasped, staring at him in horror. It was only then Vin realized that on top of having a severed hand clasped around his throat, the entire front of his body was covered in the ranker king’s blood, which couldn’t have been a pretty sight. Unable to do more than gurgle at this point, he tapped frantically at the bloody hand squeezing the life out of him, before the darkness that had been encroaching on the corners of his vision quickly became too much to ignore.

The last thing he registered before losing consciousness was Shia shouting for Scule’s help.