Low-Fantasy Occultist

Caustic vapor sizzled against the Moss Oni’s face. To a mortal creature, the acid would have melted flesh from bone. The goblinoid simply grunted, raising a corded forearm to wipe the burning liquid from its eyes. The acid left a blackened smear across its cheek, a mere superficial sting.

Yeah, that’s not gonna do much, sorry to say. Prestige beings are tougher than mortals, especially when their whole thing is resilience and brute strength.

The Oni roared and lunged, abandoning its club for its bare fists.

Devon stepped into the breach, his longsword raised. He assumed the Crescent Guard, a stance designed to deflect a superior downward strike. In Grandmaster Xander’s training rings, the form was impenetrable. Here, in the slick, blood-soaked soil of the Green Ocean, the stance’s rigid perfection became a fatal flaw.

The Oni’s fist crashed into Devon’s blade; the steel held, but the ground gave way, and Devon slipped as his center of gravity collapsed.

The monster drove its shoulder forward, aiming to crush his ribcage.

Nick watched the impending blow with cold calculation, then decided it required his intervention. He summoned a single thread of kinetic force and wove it into an invisible cushion between Devon and the Oni.

The beast’s shoulder struck the kinetic barrier, and the force shattered the shield, but the momentary resistance bled lethal momentum. Devon was thrown backward, crashing through a patch of wet ferns, gasping for breath but unbroken.

“It’s not another swordsman, Dev,” he called. “Don’t treat it as if it were.”

That was his brother’s greatest problem. He was too accustomed to fighting other warriors, having trained mostly with noble squires and knights in Alluria.

Nick had no doubt that, in time, he would have been able to adapt his style. Perhaps that was why Xander had left him here, rather than getting him out of the city during a politically tense time.

But House Crowley was growing too quickly, in both prestige and power, and there was no time to let things take their natural course. Devon, as the Heir, needed to improve now.

Rose darted in from the left. She had watched Devon fall, analyzing the Oni’s overextended posture, and seemed to have a plan, judging by the way her muscles burned with mana. Her class fought her every step, but she no longer tried to force the explosive speed of her royal bloodline.

Instead of lunging, she planted her boots in the muck and waited for the Oni to turn. As the beast pivoted, bringing its vast bulk around, Rose held her blade at an upward angle, bracing the pommel against her hip.

The monster impaled its own thigh on her steel, the sheer weight of its motion doing the work her lost speed could not.

Black sap sprayed across the ground, and the Oni howled in genuine pain for the first time, backhanding the air where Rose had stood a second earlier. She was already rolling through the dirt, abandoning her stance to avoid the crushing blow.

That was when Sonya came in. Apparently having determined that direct damage was impossible against her brews, she drew a vial of pale liquid and hurled it beneath the Oni’s wounded leg.

The glass shattered, and a violent bloom of alchemical frost erupted, coating the slick soil with ice and trapping the limb.

The Oni raised its other foot to crush the offending ice, but Sonya moved with sudden grace. She gripped her iron-shod staff, her aura flaring, and Nick knew she was about to use another skill.

She swept the base of her staff over the frozen ground, gliding above its surface and leaving a faint residue, before leaping back to avoid the monster’s retaliatory swat.

With no one to interfere, the Oni planted its foot and tried to crack the prison, but the ice offered no friction, and its leg shot outward, tearing the wounded muscle further.

Knowing that cleverness alone wouldn’t do the trick, but unwilling to let it go unrewarded, Nick added his own push, sending a blunt spike of kinetic mana to help the monster along.

The towering goblinoid crashed onto its back, shaking the forest floor with a wet snap as its wounded leg snapped.

Devon scrambled out of the ferns, eager to seize the opening.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

He ran with a predatory grace that Nick recognized as an advanced form of the [Stalking Gait], letting his boots slide through the mud. When he reached the fallen monster, he leaped and delivered a descending strike.

It was another formal technique, the Piercing Crane, but Devon altered the angle mid-flight, letting the slick terrain guide his hips rather than fighting it. Combined with the movement art, his rigidity vanished, replaced by fluid lethality.

He fell like a comet, wreathed in mana, and drove his sword precisely into the cluster of roots at the base of the Oni’s thick neck.

The blade sank to the hilt, and with another explosion of power, Devon twisted the steel, severing the spinal column.

The beast stiffened, its yellow eyes rolling back into its head. A final, gurgling breath escaped its tusks, and the Moss Oni went limp.

Nick watched its soul fade into the ether, while a blue prompt materialized in the corner of his vision.