Rimelion: The Exploiter

The Death Knight advanced.

Lunaris arms shook, but she raised her blades. The mantle draped around her felt like the only thing keeping her upright, its enchantment humming against her spine, and Paradox Slash was reassembling itself in whatever place cooldowns lived.

Come on, she thought. Not fast enough.

Old Lunaris would have charged. Old Lunaris would have met the greatsword with rapier and longsword, trusted the Chronosblade’s rhythm, trusted her speed, and died.

She took a step back instead.

“Fty,” she said, and her voice was tight. “I can’t solo this. Five seconds. No, fifteen. Make It fifteen.”

“Copy.”

Fty’s staff hit the ground, and a rune bloomed at his feet. He lanced it forward with a flick of the staff, and a thread of pale light sank into the Death Knight’s sword arm.

The swing that came was a fraction slower.

It was the difference between an impossible blow and a merely very difficult one, and Lunaris caught the greatsword on her crossed blades, angled the steel down, and let the weight of the Death Knight’s strike drive past her ribs instead of through them. The mantle flared. Her boots skidded.

She stayed upright. “Debuff on the sword arm,” Fty called. “Fifteen seconds.”

Fifteen seconds.

Lunaris thought.

Like a leader. Like the person the system had called Oathsworn in gold letters, like the person Charlie was watching right now, from wherever she was, through Lisa’s idiot stream.

What’s the real problem.

The Death Knight was the visible problem. The skeletons were the pressure. Toxica was down, casting broken, bleeding. Gravesworth was—

Gravesworth was summoning.

Gravesworth was the reason the skeletons didn’t stop. Gravesworth was the reason Fty’s ward was guttering, because sustained pressure drained him, and the pressure was sustained because Gravesworth fed it. Every skeleton the party killed came back because Gravesworth made one.

Kill Gravesworth, and the fight became manageable.

“Change of plan!” Lunaris pitched her voice to carry across the cave. “Ian—is Toxica done?”

Ian was kneeling over Toxica’s crumpled form, daggers red. “She’s out. Bleeding bad.”

“Leave her. Get to me.”

“Coming.”

“Lisa—I need Gravesworth blind, just cover. Smoke, heat, something that lets me close.”

Lisa’s head snapped around. The court mage surfaced instantly, green eyes sharpening. “On it.”

“Poundcake—you hold center. You’re our last defense now. Fty stays behind you.”

“The oven holds,” Poundcake promised.

“Fty—one more Veil on me when Lisa lights up. I’m going to Gravesworth.”

Fty’s jaw tightened. She saw the calculation cross his face, wondering whether the ward could survive his focus fragmenting. She saw him decide anyway.

“Ready on your word.”

The Death Knight recovered; the violet eyes found her. The greatsword came up again, slower now. The debuff was still bleeding through its arm, but it was already turning toward her, already reading her next move.

Lunaris caught Ian’s eye as he sprinted across the cave.

“Hold the Death Knight off me,” she said. “Fifteen seconds. That’s all I need.”

His face did something. “I can do fifteen seconds, my Swordbear,” he said.

“Don’t die.”

“I love you.”

“Ian—”

“Go.”

She went.

“NOW, Lisa!”

Lisa did something Lunaris hadn’t seen before, She raised both hands, palms toward the Bonecaller’s rock, and exhaled.

A pillar of fire erupted directly in front of Gravesworth, close enough to scorch his eyebrows, a wall of heat so dense it turned the air into a shimmering distortion. He flinched backward, threw up an arm, and for two full seconds he couldn’t see, or aim, or tell where threats were coming from.

Fty’s Veil hit Lunaris.

The world went soft. Her footfalls muted, rapier threading, longsword sweeping, not stopping for any of them, just clearing paths and moving, moving, the Chronosblade’s rhythm singing because this was what it was built for, motion as warfare, speed as survival.

Behind her, steel clashed. Ian’s voice, engaging the Death Knight. Poundcake’s palms striking bone. Lisa screaming something she couldn’t hear.

She reached the palisade.

Vaulted it.

The mantle caught on a bone-woven stake, but adjusted her fall and she was over, feet hitting stone, already moving, and Gravesworth was spinning toward her with his skull-staff raised, the fire-pillar dissipating, his face with shock because nobody had been supposed to reach him, nobody was supposed to—

He cast.

A lance of dark energy, condensed and aimed at her chest.

She slipped it. Barely. The mantle’s enchantment screamed against her shoulder, she hadn’t seen coming, and the lance punched past her and hit the cave wall and bored a hole six inches deep.

Then she was inside his guard.

He was Lv. 34, but he was a caster. His staff was a focus, not a weapon. His hands shaped magic, not steel. And Lunaris had two blades, and she was fast, and she had thirty-one seconds left on a cooldown she wasn’t going to need.

Rapier through the throat.

Longsword through the ribs.

Gravesworth’s eyes went wide and she followed in the same rthytm, as his HP drained out. Dark energy sputtered around his staff, then faded. He opened his mouth to speak or curse or scream, and what came out was a wet sound that meant he wouldn’t be doing any of those things.

He collapsed.

The cave floor stopped birthing skeletons.

Every newly-rising corpse between the party and the tunnel exit froze mid-emergence; fingers still curled, jaws still open, the half-formed dead left half-formed. The dark threads Gravesworth had been weaving dissipated into nothing, and across the chamber the skeletons that had been climbing the palisade staggered, one dropping its axe, another sinking to its knees.

They were still dangerous, but they were no longer coordinated.

The Death Knight roared.

It was the first sound it had made, a scrape of air through a dead throat that had no business carrying volume, and it turned from Ian and came at Lunaris across the cave with the greatsword already rising. Whatever command had been feeding it through Gravesworth was gone, but it wasn’t dead, it was autonomous enough to choose a target, and it had chosen her.

“Get behind me!” Poundcake called.

At some point during the Veil-run, he’d left the center and positioned himself on an intercept angle, feet planted between Lunaris and the oncoming Death Knight.

His sleeves were rolled back, hands bare. The warmth of the Proving had gone silent; he’d dropped it, pulled the compulsion in, and what stood in its place was something older. A stance Lunaris didn’t recognize because she’d never seen Poundcake actually brace.

The Death Knight swung.

Poundcake caught its arm.

Both hands, one at the wrist, one at the elbow, and he pivoted with the swing instead of against it, rolled the momentum, and drove the greatsword into the cave floor. Stone cracked. The Death Knight’s skull snapped forward with the redirected force, the damaged neck joint screaming, and for one second it was off-balance, overcommitted, the whole massive frame tilted forward over the buried blade.

“Lunaris,” Poundcake said. “The bread—” He stopped. Looked at the Death Knight’s exposed neck. “Kill it.”

Maybe the cooldown of Paradox Slash had finished on time. Maybe it hadn’t. Maybe the mantle had nudged the last second, or the system had looked at Charlie’s stream and the shape of Lunaris’s fight and decided, for once, to round toward sincerity.

She didn’t know.

She didn’t care.

Lunaris hit the Death Knight’s damaged neck with everything she had.

Rapier first, threading the crack she’d opened with the first Paradox Slash, and this time the phantom strike came from half a second in the future, a Lunaris who had already seen the angle, who had already decided, whose longsword was already inside the joint, tearing upward.

The second strike ignored armor.

The second strike ignored the Death Knight’s unholy durability.

The second strike severed what was left of the neck.

The skull came free.

It landed on the cave floor with a sound that was almost musical—a hollow clink, a rattle, the violet light in the eye sockets flickering once, twice, and then going out like a candle in a draft. The armored body stood for a moment without it, greatsword still buried in stone, one hand still locked around the hilt. Then the hand opened. The body folded. The armor collapsed inward with the clatter of a thousand small parts forgetting they’d belonged together.

The cave went quiet.

Lunaris stood over the remains, breathing hard, her arms hanging at her sides. The uncoordinated skeletons were still moving. “Clean them up,” she said, and her voice was rougher than she’d meant it. “Nothing fancy. Just finish it.”

Lisa did. Ordinary fireballs this time, one after another. The skeletons went to ash in batches. Ian moved through what Lisa didn’t reach, daggers cleaning up, his footwork better now that he wasn’t fighting for his life, and Lunaris watched him and thought: he got better. In twenty minutes. He got better.

[Attention! Bonus experience due to level disparity!]

[Various enemies had been defeated; Various amounts of contribution: +186,733XP]

[Congratulations! You are now level 26!]

[Congratulations! You are now level 27!]

[Congratulations! You are now level 28!]

[Congratulations! You are now level 29! XP to next level: 9,684/42,050]

Name: Lunaris

HP: 383 | STR: 67

ST: 315 | AGI: 253

MANA: 88 | INT: 59

Poundcake was already checking the loot.

He crossed to Toxica first. She was alive, barely, dark energy no longer curling around her hands. Her breathing was shallow; the plague magic she’d hit Ian with was coming back through her own shoulder where Ian’s dagger had opened her. Poundcake knelt, examined her, and looked up at Lunaris.

“She will live if Fty can spare a heal,” he said. “Or she will not, if he cannot.”

Lunaris looked at Fty.

Fty looked back. His face gave her nothing. This was her decision.

She thought about it.

She thought about Gravesworth laughing. About Veranthos pushing the miasma north, about the plan Toxica had described; the vanguard, the officers, the empire of dead things, her eyes bright and her voice eager.

She thought about Charlie. About the stream.

Charlie would save her.

Toxica didn’t deserve it. No, but Charlie didn’t throw away pieces until she was sure they were empty.

“Heal her,” Lunaris said. “Enough to stabilize her HP. Nothing more. Bind her hands.”

“Copy,” Fty said. He drew a thread of green light from his staff, thinner than the ones he’d been giving Ian all fight, almost grudging, and lanced it into Toxica’s shoulder. The wet breathing steadied.

Ian produced rope from somewhere, and tied Toxica’s wrists behind her back with a technique that looked suspiciously like something he’d practiced. She filed that for later.

“She’ll talk?” Lisa asked.

“She’ll have to,” Lunaris said.

She didn’t know if that was true. She said it as if it were.

The notification bloomed without warning.

[Epic Quest: The Oathsworn’s Redemption — Secondary Objective updated]

The Necromancers’ outpost within the Ashenvault cave system has been neutralized. Two guild members encountered; one terminated, one captured for interrogation. The territorial dispute over the cave system is resolved in Rimebreak’s favor, pending final assessment at the tower.

Partial progress: Secondary Objective — 40%

Note: The guild’s main force remains within the Twir outpost. Their response to this engagement is unknown. Proceed with caution.

Do well.

Lunaris closed the notification.

She stood in the cave with blood on her rapier and ash on her boots, and how Gravesworth was somewhere on Earth now staring at a death screen.

The same thing Brian had done to her.

Oh, stars, not again this feeling!

She closed her eyes.

She didn’t cry. She wasn’t going to cry about this in front of her team. She wasn’t going to cry about this on Charlie’s stream.

But she let herself feel it, for three full breaths, and then she opened her eyes and put it somewhere.

“Okay,” she said. “We keep moving.”

Ian reached her before she’d finished the sentence.

He didn’t say anything. He put his arms around her, daggers still sheathed at his hips, his chest armor cold where she pressed her face into it, and he held her, thumb tracing a small circle on the back of her neck. “You did it,” he whispered, only for her. “You did it, Luna.”

“Brian did this to me,” she said, and her voice was tiny. “He didn’t lose class, but I attacked him… because… my Queen wanted it.”

“You did to him what Brian did to you,” Ian said. “His reasons were different, but he Don ordered him.”

“Yes.”

“And you’re thinking about whether that makes you like Brian.”

“Yes.”

Ian was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Brian laughed about it. You’re not laughing.”

She pulled back enough to look at him. “Did I make the right call?”

He thought about it.

He actually thought about it, he didn’t give her the reassurance. He stopped, and he weighed it. “Yes.”

“Okay.”

“Luna?”

“Yeah?”

“You were amazing.”

She felt blood rush to her cheeks, and she leaned back into his chest before he could see it. His arms tightened.

Somewhere above her, faintly, she heard Lisa say: “Take your time, we all have cooldowns anyway.”

They took a full five minutes.

Nobody argued. Fty sat against the palisade with his staff across his knees and didn’t move, Lisa sat next to him. Ian and Lunaris stood together, not quite embracing anymore, but with her shoulder tucked under his arm, her mantle draped over both of them like a blanket they didn’t quite know they were sharing.

Poundcake was the only one still moving.

He went to Gravesworth and recovered a bone-charm amulet that pulsed faintly with dark energy, "Command relay," he said, holding it up to Fty, who nodded, and a roll of parchment sealed with wax. He set both on the palisade’s flat top, beside Toxica’s unconscious form.

Then he sat too. Back against the palisade, arms folded, eyes closed.

“Is that him meditating?” Ian asked quietly.

“I think that’s him taking a break,” Lunaris murmured.

“Bakers deserve breaks.”

“They do.”

Fty spoke without opening his eyes. “Twenty minutes,” he said. “Then we move.”

“Twenty minutes,” Lunaris agreed, and rested her cheek against Ian’s shoulder.