Rimelion: The Exploiter

The Death Knight covered the distance in three strides.

Lunaris barely registered the movement before the greatsword came down; not the overhead chop of a mindless undead, but a diagonal cut that started high and swept toward her ribs with the mechanical precision of something that had killed a thousand people and remembered every single one.

She threw herself sideways. The blade passed close enough that the mantle snapped taut against her shoulder, and she felt the enchantment flare, a pulse of cold silver light deflecting the edge by centimeters.

The greatsword hit the cave floor. Stone cracked. A fissure spread from the impact point like a frozen lightning bolt, and Lunaris’s boots skidded on the newly fractured ground.

Fast. Too fast for something that big.

“Luna!” Ian was at her left, daggers drawn, but his eyes were on the Death Knight, and what she saw in his face wasn’t the usual panic. It was a calculation. Frantic, counting the seconds between the swing and the recovery.

“I’m fine! Hold the flank!”

The skeletons were pouring in. Not a wave this time, they moved in a formation, splitting into two columns that curved around the party’s edges like pincers.

Lisa’s fireballs punched through them in bursts of gold and heat, three at a time, four, but more rose to replace them, Gravesworth’s staff pulsing with dark energy every time a new batch clawed up from the cave floor.

Poundcake stood at the center. The Proving radiated outward, and the skeletons closest to him were already curving inward, abandoning their flanking routes to come at him instead. He broke the first one’s spine with an open-palm strike that sounded like a dry branch snapping.

The second he redirected into the third, using its own momentum to create a pile-up that he dismantled with unhurried violence.

Nine. Ten. Eleven, and he hadn’t taken a step.

Fty’s ward pulsed behind them all, green light flickering at the edges. The heal spell flared toward Ian, who took a hit. He wasn’t talking. His hands were shaking.

The Death Knight recovered. Its skull turned toward Lunaris, violet eyes burning steadily, and the greatsword came up in a guard that looked wrong on an undead, too human, the muscle memory of someone who’d been a warrior before they’d been a corpse.

It advanced.

Lunaris set her feet. Rapier forward, longsword back, the dual-blade stance that was as natural as breathing. The mantle settled around her shoulders, and she could feel it; the guidance, the faint whisper of enchantment that adjusted her balance, that nudged her blades toward openings she couldn’t see yet.

The Death Knight swung. She slipped it, rapier deflecting the flat of the greatsword just enough to change the angle, longsword sweeping under for the gap between breastplate and pauldron.

Steel scraped on plate.

No damage.

The armor held, the blade turned, and the Death Knight’s counter came so fast that Lunaris took the pommel across her forearm before she could retract.

Pain flashed white. She stumbled, and the greatsword followed, a rising cut aimed at her chest—

Now.

[Paradox Slash activated]

Two strikes in the same instant.

The rapier found the neck joint, and the phantom strike struck the same joint from a future that existed for exactly one second. The second strike ignored armor. Ignored the Death Knight’s unholy durability entirely, and the damage that landed was less than the first strike, but it landed, and black ichor sprayed from the gap in the armor where none should have come through.

The Death Knight staggered.

One step. Just one. Its hand went to the wound, a reflexive gesture from whatever human instinct still lived in the dead muscle, and the violet light in its eye sockets flared, surprise, or the closest thing an undead could manage.

Then it straightened.

[Death Knight Lv.42]

Type: 3-rare HP: 19,32/2,200

Almost no damage from her strongest skill. With a two-minute cooldown.

I can hurt it, Lunaris thought. But I can’t kill it. Not like this. Not trading blows for two minutes between each Paradox Slash while it hits back with a greatsword that cracks stone.

“The skeletons won’t stop!” Ian shouted from her left. He was fighting two at once, Quick-Draw daggers flashing, and his technique was still sloppy—elbows too wide, footwork too reactive—but the daggers were fast and his commitment was total. He put one down with a stab through the eye socket, pivoted, caught the other’s sword arm and punched his second dagger through its jaw. “Gravesworth keeps summoning! We kill five and he makes six!”

“I know!”

“So we stop him!”

Ian was right. Again. The revelation that Ian had tactical instincts kept hitting Lunaris like a recurring notification she couldn’t dismiss.

“Lisa!” Lunaris called, dancing back from the Death Knight’s next swing. “Can you reach Gravesworth?”

“Not without dropping fire on the skeletons between us, and Poundcake is—”

“I’ll survive the heat,” Poundcake said, not breaking rhythm. Palm strike. Redirect. Another skeleton collapsed.

“The ward won’t!” Fty’s voice was strained. “Lisa’s fire inside my protection field will destabilize it. I can’t hold buffs and a ward at the same time.”

The Death Knight pressed forward. Lunaris parried, deflected, retreated another step. The cave wall was getting closer behind her.

Think. Think like a leader, not a duelist.

“New plan!” Lunaris shouted. “Lisa—keep the skeleton count manageable. Fireballs only, controlled, nothing that touches the ward. Poundcake—hold center, protect Fty. Ian—”

She looked at him.

He looked back.

His ears were red. His daggers were bloody.

He was trying. She could see it; the wide eyes, the rapid breathing, the white-knuckle grip on the dagger hilts. He was trying, and he was standing exactly where she’d told him to stand, and he hadn’t moved.

“Toxica,” Lunaris said. “She’s the lower level. She’s the one raising the undead from the floor. If you can disrupt her casting—”

“I’ll do it,” Ian said. The words came out clean and certain, and Lunaris loved him, and she was sending him toward a Plagueshaper who could probably wipe the floor with him, and those two facts existed simultaneously, and neither one cancelled the other.

“Quick-Draw close. Hit hard. Don’t let her concentrate.”

“Luna.” He stepped closer, and his hand found her face, just for a second, thumb on her cheekbone, and his voice dropped to something only she could hear. “You’re amazing.”

“You too,” she whispered.

He turned and ran.

Ian moved through the skeleton line like water through a broken dam, daggers clearing a path of desperate slashes that relied more on the Ironbite’s edge than any technique, and the Quick-Draw effect meant his recovery was faster than it had any right to be, each dagger snapping back to ready position before the last skeleton had finished falling.

Toxica saw him coming. Her eyes widened, and the dark energy around her hands flared, gathering into something dense and targeted—

Ian activated his skill.

Lunaris blinked; this was his [All-in] skill.

Five seconds with zero defense.

No dodging or switching.

Pure killing.

His first dagger caught her casting hand. She screamed, shock, not pain, the sound of a caster who had never been touched in melee, who relied on summons and distance and the assumption that no one would be stupid enough to charge her through a field of undead.

Ian was exactly that stupid.

His second strike slashed across her staff arm, and the dark energy feeding into the ground stuttered. The undead she’d been raising mid-emergence froze, half-buried, fingers still reaching but the will behind them gone.

She hit him with something; a pulse of plague magic that caught him in the chest and staggered him backward, and the damage was real, his health dropping, but he had two seconds of All In left, and he used them.

Third strike. Through her shoulder guard. She went down on one knee, casting broken, the smoke around her hands dissipating.

“You—” Toxica snarled.

The five seconds ended. Ian stood over her, breathing hard, daggers dripping, completely open to the skeleton that was already swinging at his unguarded back—

Fty’s heal caught him a millisecond before the blow landed, green light stitching into his skin, and Ian spun, caught the skeleton’s blade on his dagger guard, and kicked it backward with a boot to the pelvis that sent it sprawling.

Sloppy, desperate, but effective.

“Gravesworth!” Toxica screamed. “Kill the dagger boy!”

But Gravesworth was busy. Lisa had shifted her fire, not toward the Bonecaller directly but around him, fireballs landing in a pattern that forced him to move, to dodge, to stop summoning long enough that the skeleton count froze. She couldn’t reach him through the Death Knight’s zone, but she could make his life miserable from range, and Lisa made misery beautifully.

The Death Knight turned toward Ian.

No.

Lunaris threw herself at it. Rapier first, then longsword, reckless, loud, everything she had, striking the damaged neck joint, the greave, the elbow, anywhere the Paradox Slash had cracked the armor. The blows did minimal damage, chip damage, the fighting that kept something’s attention rather than ending it.

It worked.

The Death Knight’s skull snapped back to her. The greatsword came around in a horizontal sweep—

She ducked it. Barely. The blade passed over her head close enough to shave hair, and the wind of its passage ripped the mantle sideways.

She came up inside its reach. Rapier into the neck wound. Longsword across the knee joint. The Death Knight’s leg buckled, just for an instant, and she hammered the advantage, both blades working in concert, the Chronosblade’s rhythm singing through her arms—

The backhand caught her across the chest.

It was its fist. Gauntleted, massive, swung with contempt of something swatting a fly, and Lunaris went airborne.

She hit the cave wall.

The impact drove the air from her lungs in a single explosive gasp, and the stone cracked behind her shoulders, and the mantle’s enchantment flared so bright it painted the cave silver. She slid down the wall, legs failing, and the ground met her with a thud that rattled her teeth.

[HP: 291/945]

The Death Knight turned toward her, his greatsword raised and the violet eyes burned down at her.

The blade came down.

Lunaris was going to die.

She knew it; a greatsword moving faster than her broken body could roll, the angle wrong, the timing wrong, everything wrong—

[Slipstream activated]

She swapped.

Reality hiccupped.

The greatsword hit the cave wall where she’d been lying. Stone exploded. And Lunaris was standing inside the Death Knight’s reach, exactly where she’d been before the backhand, health still at 291, body still screaming, but alive, and the Death Knight’s blade was buried in rock and its guard was open.

One chance.

Both blades. Throat joint. Everything.

The rapier found the crack the Paradox Slash had opened. The longsword followed, leveraging the gap, twisting, and the Death Knight’s neck joint separated. The skull tilted at an angle that no amount of unholy animation could correct, and the violet light in its eyes stuttered.

[Death Knight Lv.42]

Type: 3-rare HP: 1,134/2,200

Still alive, but damaged, the skull hanging at a grotesque angle, one arm slower than the other as the damaged neck disrupted whatever magical signals controlled the body.

As it pulled its greatsword from the wall, stone fragments rained down, and it raised the blade again.

Lunaris’s legs were shaking. Her HP was a red sliver. Slipstream was gone. Paradox Slash had forty seconds left on cooldown. The mantle hung heavy on her shoulders.

Behind her, Ian was still fighting Toxica’s remaining undead, bloody and exhausted. Lisa’s fireballs were coming slower. Fty’s ward was guttering. Poundcake was still standing, but even his ring of crumpled undead was three deep now, and more were coming.

And Gravesworth was laughing.

“You should’ve left when I offered,” he called, skull-staff pulsing, and fresh skeletons clawed from the stone at his feet. “Nobody threatens us. Nobody takes what’s ours.”

The Death Knight advanced.

Lunaris raised her blades.

Forty seconds.

The mantle caught the blue firelight one more time, silver against the dark, and the snowflake crest on her shoulder glowed faintly, stubbornly, like a star refusing to go out.

Come on, she thought. Thirty-nine.