Chapter 141: Descent
The figure walking toward them was the beastman king, his height now more than half again what it had been before. His loyal followers all lay collapsed on the ground, unconscious. Evan studied the two-headed figure, green light flickering across his body, threaded here and there with faint traces of red. In his hand he carried a great club, thick at one end and tapering at the other, black all over and gleaming with a deep emerald light — a rare magical weapon in its own right.
Evan's brow furrowed slightly. He felt certain the king had drawn on some forbidden technique to siphon life force from his own people. Of his two heads, one had eyes gone bloodshot, the other cold and composed. The bloodshot head screamed, "Damned humans! I'll tear your heads from your bodies!"
He charged, roaring, straight at the nearest group — Viscount Modi's. Modi's face went pale, and two of his knights surged forward to meet the charge, their greatswords flaring a brilliant red as they swept in from either side. Both men were built powerfully, though neither stood even half the king's height.
At the flash of red sword-force, the beastman king leapt high into the air, his club flaring dark emerald, its shadow swelling like a mountain bearing down from above with a shrieking whistle. Both knights raised their blades together, roaring as red sword-force surged upward to meet the blow.
In the same instant, Corey struck — cold light gathering, an incantation rising, ice lances shrieking toward the king. As they closed in, he roared, and a ripple of green light dissolved them into nothing before they could land. His club met the two knights' blades head-on with a crash, and both men were flung sprawling across the ground, blood spraying from their mouths, bones cracking audibly. One greatsword shattered outright with a ringing note, the other flying loose across the plaza. One knight collapsed unconscious; the other, though awake, took injuries severe enough to end his part in the fight.
The beastman king was moving in to finish them off when a string of bowstrings sang and several red beams of light streaked toward him. He swung his club, and one of the arrows — an Explosive Fire Arrow — detonated against it. He staggered back a step, and then a wave of spells came at him like colored dragons descending, forcing him back several more steps under the barrage, the green light around his body thinning visibly. That was the moment Evan chose to act.
He unleashed a Spirit Arrow — a low-tier necromantic spell, though one cast by an Arcanist carried far more force than an ordinary mage's version. It struck home with a wet crack, punching straight through the green light into his body. The green glow flickered — and the Spirit Arrow simply vanished. Evan's eyes narrowed. Not far off, one of the unconscious one-eyed beastmen lying on the ground suddenly jerked upright, then slumped back down, dead.
Evan gave a short grunt. The king had shifted the damage onto one of his own followers. "He has a death-transference technique!" he shouted.
By then the two fallen knights had been dragged clear and dosed with healing potions — not enough to bring them back into the fight, though their lives were no longer in danger. Both arms broken, they'd be out of the battle for good.
The moment Evan called out the warning, understanding spread instantly. Corey reacted first. "Kill the beastmen lying on the ground!"
"You dare, you filthy humans!" The beastman king lost himself entirely to fury, charging forward like a rolling war machine. More knights moved to meet him, locked in close combat, while the remaining mages and archers turned their fire on the unconscious beastmen scattered across the plaza.
Even unconscious, the beastmen weren't entirely undefended — layers of green light rose around each of them, threaded with faint red, though far weaker than what shielded the king himself. After two or three volleys, another beastman fell dead. The king let out a furious roar, and something about his frame seemed to shrink, however slightly.
The tactic was working, and everyone's spirits lifted at the sight — a few thieves and knights even started hunting down the unconscious beastmen specifically. The king's roars came faster now, his combat strength dropping with every loss, while the knights ringing him took another casualty and two more wounds, though more knights kept surging in, blood clearly up. The battle settled into a grinding stalemate.
As the beastmen died one by one, Evan held to his own principle. Allies for the moment or not, once the beastmen started falling, he offered only magical support, and even that grew weaker and more sparing over time as he held back his true strength. He noticed the same restraint growing among the other two parties' mages. The overall outcome seemed decided.
Viscount Modi's side felt the sting without any way to voice it — outmaneuvered by Evan from the start, though at least between the two allied parties, their combined strength still outmatched Evan's group. Wiping out Evan's people entirely was already out of the question, especially with Evan's group clearly on guard against exactly that.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
With every beastman but the king dealt with, Modi began calculating his losses, his eyes drifting to the weapon in the king's hand — a material he couldn't identify, but unmistakably a true magical artifact, and given its sheer size, it might fetch hundreds of thousands of gold at auction, or at minimum a hundred thousand even sold quietly. A weapon like that was worth claiming at any cost.
Evan had no idea what Modi was thinking, nor did he much care — the man was already weighing how to recoup his losses. As for whatever grudge lay between Evan and the Gonuo Society, that was none of Modi's concern; he wasn't one of them, at most an ally of convenience, and he had his own interests to look after. He'd already calculated the safest path forward: offend neither side.
The beastman king stood nearly twice a normal human's height by now, muttering something under his breath as green light gathered behind him. Barely noticed at first, it condensed with startling speed, and in an instant took the shape of two great emerald wings. With a resounding cry, he rose off the ground entirely.
None of the knights had reached Great Knight rank, and even a Great Knight could only manage short bursts of flight without some special technique or artifact to aid them. The knights surrounding him could only watch helplessly as he took to the air. A bowstring sang, and a streak of blue-green light shot after him — a Gale Arrow from one of the mage-archers, wind-aligned.
The beastman king swung his club and knocked the arrow aside. A whistle of wind followed — a string of Wind Blades converging on him — and he swung again, scattering them apart. But within that scattering, a faint thread of black smoke had slipped through unnoticed, and by the time he registered it, it had already revealed its true shape, coiling around him like a cord. He let out a scream and tumbled crookedly out of the sky.
"Don't let him get away! Take him, seize that weapon from his hands!" Viscount Modi shouted.
His knights surged forward at once, racing toward where the beastman king had fallen. Evan let out a quiet breath of relief. He'd achieved exactly what he'd wanted — the beastmen's strength was broken, and his enemies had been weakened as well, from overwhelming advantage down to, at best, a slim edge. He hadn't expected to gut their strength outright; steady erosion was enough. The window for anyone here to make trouble for him and his people was closing fast. He still had tricks left unused, and he intended to keep them that way — using them now would only mean he'd entered real danger.
Neither Evan nor anyone else noticed that the beastman king had fallen directly onto the altar itself. He struggled upright, grabbed one of the obsidian knives, and drove it into his own chest, chanting as he did. "Great Lord of Life, god shining in highest glory — your servant offers himself as sacrifice, and begs you grant him unmatched, invincible power!"
Blood surged out in a fountain, pooling and flowing along the intricate sigils carved into the altar. Red and green light burst up together from the stone, and a vast, overwhelming power descended from the sky — solemn, majestic — though Evan sensed something faintly wrong woven through it. What was that? He stared hard at the vast, manifested force taking shape before them, feeling that it wasn't purely divine at all, but shot through with something strange and unsettling.
Several knights closing in on the altar were flung backward the instant that power descended. A clear, ringing voice spoke. "Lowly creature. Who has dared offend my faithful servant?"
The voice struck Evan's ears, and his frown deepened. It was, unmistakably, the voice of Avna, the goddess of life — and yet something about it felt wrong. He'd always held a good impression of Avna; something told him she shouldn't sound like this. But he couldn't be certain — gods and mortals belonged to entirely different orders of being, ascension a transformation like a butterfly breaking from its chrysalis, and Evan, lich though he was, still carried human feeling and remained a stranger to true divinity. Avna's soul had split into three fragments — what differences might exist between them, Evan had no way to know.
While he turned this over, the beastman king's blood had already drained entirely, the whole altar wreathed in a mist of crimson. This was blood sacrifice, pure and simple — an ancient rite from before the Creationist Church's rise, one that had long since branded any god worshipped through such means a devil, an evil god through and through. The thought sharpened Evan's focus, and he lifted his head to study this so-called goddess carefully.
Evan could still think clearly enough to search for the truth beneath all this, but everyone else had simply frozen. They'd all been raised on faith in the Creator, however imperfect their devotion might have been in practice, a belief woven into their very souls since childhood — and yet the Creator had never once descended among them. Here, though, a goddess of life stood manifest before their eyes. A god was a god; how could any mortal hope to stand against one? Even Viscount Modi, ordinarily so glib and confident, found himself entirely without words in the goddess's presence — simply not fainting outright already counted as a show of considerable inner strength.
Upon the altar, no true form could yet be seen, the mist of blood churning and slowly coalescing into the shape of a woman, dressed in a pale green gown, shoulders bare, a Scepter of Life in her hand, light flickering faintly behind her head. A crown of woven evergreen vines circled her brow, set with a single green gem shaped like some kind of fruit. She stood barefoot, her feet smooth and unblemished, her right hand holding a golden scepter tipped with two leaves, vivid and glistening as though freshly grown.
Her face matched Avna's exactly — but her eyes lacked that particular quality Avna's had always carried, something like the endless turning of blossom and decay. Something clicked in Evan's mind. "Who are you?" he asked.