Explorer of Edregon

“Reginald!” Vin and Alka both screamed together as sand was blasted in every direction a second time. The ranker king hadn’t activated whatever insane skill he’d used to form the crater when he struck, but Reginald had still taken the full-force of a blow from someone whose strength attribute was probably over a hundred at a bare minimum. Not even daring to look to see what horrific state Reginald’s body was in, Vin screamed as he raised his hands and began casting as fast as he physically could. “Fireball! Fireball! Fireball!”

The ranker king turned and cut through his magical attacks with his flickering blade, gazing at him with those tear-filled eyes that just made Vin all the angrier. Walking toward him, the ranker king opened his mouth to say something, before closing it once more, forced to turn his focus on Alka who had all but thrown herself in fury at the man’s side.

“You bastard!” she shouted, her voice warbling and loud enough to wake the dead as it blasted out of the air around her head across the desert. “He wasn’t even in the fight!”

“I know. It was dishonorable,” he ranker king wept, meeting her blow for blow and quickly putting her on the backfoot once more despite her anger. “I can feel my honor dwindling with every second… All the years I spent… All the challenges I faced… All washing away as if they’d never happened.”

Even through Vin’s rage as he tried desperately to come up with some way to kill the ranker king and make him pay for what he’d done, he blinked at the realization that Scule’s poison was actually doing something. The dart was still sticking out of the man’s neck, and only now did he spot the dark, purple veins ever so slowly spreading out from where the dart impacted. It was as if the poison was being slowed down, but not nullified like they’d first thought.

“Alka, I think he actually uses honor like some sort of resource!” Vin shouted, firing off another Fireball that was slashed through effortlessly. “Like mages use mana! Only he cast off his honor at the start of the fight, he’s not making any more of it! We need to keep making him use those weird skills!”

“I don’t care about any of that, I’m going to cut his head off!” Alka roared, actually startling him out of his own grief for a moment from the sheer anguish in her voice. Never before had Vin heard her sound like that, and the sorrow within his chest only grew worse as she screamed. Alka all but threw her own defenses to the wayside, focusing purely on offense as she finally began taking the full force of the ranker king’s attacks in order to land her own blows. The two of them were fairly evenly matched when it came to skill, but unfortunately, Alka simply couldn’t hold a candle against the man’s incredible strength. She actually managed to land a few superficial cuts against him as they fought, but none of them came without cost. Vin’s eyes widened as he realized the ranker king’s flickering sword was carving deep gashes into her golem body every time one of his own attacks landed, and Alka’s sleek, darthsteel-plated form was rapidly getting torn apart.

“Alka! Your body!”

“I don’t care, save Reginald!” she shouted, fighting like a woman possessed as another chunk of her body was split open.

Nodding, Vin turned and made a beeline for the much-smaller crater in the center of the sands. The last thing he wanted to do was gaze upon Reginald’s broken body, but if there was even the slimmest chance he could be saved, he would do whatever he could to make that happen.

Alka had led the ranker king a short distance away, but their clash of blades was still close enough that Vin was struck by the occasional blast of sand as he ran. Spotting Reginald’s collapsed body, Vin dropped to his knees beside it, preparing himself for the worst.

What he wasn’t prepared for, was finding Reginald crouching there in the sand, looking entirely unharmed.

“Reginald?” Vin blinked, all his pain and anguish vanishing as quickly as it had come as he tried to come to terms with what he was seeing. “But I swore I saw the ranker king’s fist hit you! How are you…”

As he spoke, Reginald turned to look at him, and he was shocked when the rat let out a high-pitched, grief-filled squeak that sounded like nothing he’d ever heard before. He wanted to ask what was wrong, but before he could get the chance, Reginald finally moved to the side.

Revealing Scule’s unmoving body.

“Wha… But how…” Vin stammered, unable to even string a sentence together as he stared at Scule’s lifeless body. “I saw you push him out of the way and take the hit! What happened?!”

Reginald let out another pained squeak as his body shook, and Vin picked up on his meaning easily enough.

“Your boon of loyalty?” he repeated, flinching as a particularly powerful clang of metal on metal off to the side reminded him that now probably wasn’t the best time to be crouching in the sand and having a conversation. “But that was your boon! How did—”

Vin froze, the answer suddenly coming to him like a smack to the face. “It was Scule’s Magical Bond passive, wasn’t it? He said it lets you guys share all magical effects, and I guess that includes divine magic! He sacrificed his life to save yours!”

Reginald squeaked again, shaking as he bent down and rubbed his face against Scule’s lifeless body. Curiously, despite using Reginald’s boon to take the blow that should have killed him, even with everything going on, Vin noted how Scule’s body wasn’t pulverized like it should have been from taking the ranker king’s punch head on. He didn’t know the inner workings of Reginald’s divine boon, but he could only assume it worked similar to his own in how it mitigated damage when it activated.

Thankfully, they could work with this.

“Reginald, it’s alright, everything’s going to be okay!” he said, wincing again as Alka screamed at the top of her lungs behind him. “We have the gem of resurrection! We can bring him back!”

Reginald froze mid squeak, recoiling at the sudden reminder. It seemed he’d completely forgotten about the gem in his anguish, because he let out a quiet, almost timid squeak of uncertainty.

“Yes, he’ll be fine! But you need to get his body out of here before anything happens to it!” Vin ordered, getting to his feet and turning to stare at what was probably the greatest display of martial skill he’d ever witnessed as Alka and the ranker king battled their way across the sands. “Bring him to the others! As soon as we’re done here, we’ll bring him back!”

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

Reginald let out a determined squeak before wrapping his tail around Scule’s body and hoisting him onto his back. As he turned and sprinted off with a new look of determination in his eyes, Vin prepared himself for what came next.

He talked a big game, but he didn’t have the faintest idea of how to actually take down the ranker king.

Even now, with Scule’s poison having finally spread a solid foot through the ranker king’s veins and arteries, the purple swelling reaching up to the lower half of his face as he continued to fight, the ranker king was clearly the one winning their exchange. Vin knew Alka was talented, and it said a lot about her abilities that she was holding her own against a warrior in his third prestige, but she had her limits.

After all, the ranker king was apparently a prodigy as well.

By now, Alka’s body looked as though it had been put through a magical blender. Her darthsteel plating was chipped and damaged just about everywhere, revealing the white marble-like material underneath that the librarian’s golems were made of. A material capable of shrugging off lava and just about anything else they’d ever tried throwing at it.

Which was being carved into with every slash of the ranker king’s sword.

The thin darthsteel plating was actually holding up against the sword better than the thicker layer of white marble, and it wasn’t hard for Vin to guess why that was the case. The ranker king himself had declared that this weird ‘releasing of honor’ he’d undergone to fight them was something saved for combating enemies who fought dishonorably themselves.

In other words, enemies who fought with magic.

If his sword can cut through my Fireballs without issue, I’d bet Alka’s golem body has magic baked into it somehow, Vin realized, glancing at his golem arm. Which means he’ll cut through my own arm like it was made of regular flesh if I try to block with it.

“Alka, Reginald is okay!” he shouted, running in a wide circle to try and get back behind the ranker king as he worked to come up with some sort of plan. “Scule took the hit for him! Reginald is safe!”

“Reginald is alive?” Alka shouted back, her anguished cries instantly turning into a laugh of relief as her almost berserker-style fighting she’d taken on in her sorrow returned to her far calmer, more flexible style. “Thank the Gods for that! In that case, can I get a hand here? I’m getting tired of being the badass fighter who keeps having to save all you idiots!”

“Asking for help during a personal challenge,” the ranker king muttered, shaking his head as his tears continued spilling down his face. “Show Me Your Honor!”

Without warning, Alka froze mid twist, her body jerking upright like some sort of puppet. The ranker king himself stopped what he was doing, and Vin watched as the two of them stood before the other, facing off with mere feet between them. Slowly, they each raised their respective swords, as if preparing to trade one single blow for one single blow.

Vin paled at the realization of what the ranker king’s skill was forcing to happen. Alka was the most skilled warrior he’d ever seen, but she was held back by the golem body she inhabited, which was only about as strong as a warrior in their first prestige.

There wasn’t a chance in hell she could best the ranker king in a battle of strength. She’d be killed instantly.

Attempting to cast a spell, Vin gasped as he felt some sort of pulse of mana radiate out of the ranker king and push through him, disrupting his runic formation and causing his mana to slip through his mental fingertips as if it were liquid. Whatever weird ability the ranker king was using, it would not be interrupted by something as ‘dishonorable’ as magic.

“Alka!” he shouted, throwing his magic aside as he instead tried to run through the sand toward her. But even as he ran, he knew he’d never close the distance between them in time. His mind flashed back to the last time he’d seen a warrior raise their sword like this in front of Alka. Back when the divine warrior carved through her ethereal body with his glowing sword, nearly snuffing her life out right from under his nose. He desperately tried to force his mana to overcome the ranker king’s skill, and he could feel himself actually succeeding as his formation slowly came together through sheer willpower... But it wasn’t fast enough. Yet just as the two of their swords came into position, right before they could strike one another, something rather unexpected happened.

Alka threw up in the ranker king’s face.

Vin nearly tripped in his shock, stumbling to a stop as he tried to figure out what just happened. He wasn’t the only one who was surprised, it would seem, as the ranker king leapt backward a few dozen feet as his skill came to an abrupt end, shouting as he tried to claw the slime off of his face.

Wait… Slime?

“That’a schlime, Epli, keep him distracted!” Alka shouted, laughing as she immediately closed the distance between them once more, not giving the ranker king a moment’s rest as she went hard on the offensive. Epli, the schlime that spent most days sleeping within the tiny space separating Alka’s head from her helmet, had finally joined the fray, and was doing a damn good job of trying to suffocate the ranker king. Alka wasn’t giving the man even a second to focus on scraping the schlime off his face, which meant at the moment, he wasn’t getting any oxygen.

Let’s work with that, shall we?

“Enhance Gravity!” Vin shouted, realizing their best bet was to try and wear the ranker king down and make things harder for him. “Vibrate!”

After tripling the gravity on the ranker king, Vin focused on trying to shake the sands immediately under his feet. He already knew from past experiences that trying to disrupt a skilled warrior’s footing with something large like Stone Wall was nearly impossible, but shaking the ground and giving him one more thing to worry about might not be a bad idea.

“Rapid Growth!”

Vin blinked as a few seeds landed around the ranker king, cracking open as they were imbued with nature magic before exploding into twisting vines that did their best to worm their way around the ranker king’s legs and arms, tugging on them and making it even harder to move his limbs. He glanced over to see Shia panting off to the side, her face pale and blood streaming down a handful of wounds, but on her feet and glaring at the ranker king.

“My class ability! I was able to divert most of the damage into the plants making up Living Giant!” Shia shouted, sparing him a quick glance before turning back toward the ranker king. “Now come on, let’s finish this! Entangling Thorns!”

As Shia’s plants dragged him down with the help of Vin’s heightened gravity and unstable footing. As Epli stole his air and Scule’s poison spread through his upper body. And as Alka laid into him with the full fury of a Slayer scorned, the ranker king eventually dropped to a knee in the sand as his immense strength bled out of him. The man roared one final time, his voice barely audible through the mouthful of schlime.

“Dishonorable, cowards! You. Lack. H—”

While Vin had a pretty good guess of what that last word was going to be, they’d never know for sure what it was they lacked, as that was the moment Alka’s sword cleaved through the ranker king’s neck.

Separating the man’s head from his body and sending it rolling across the blood-soaked sand.