Rimelion: The Exploiter

Lunaris was fighting…

The Death Knight took two steps forward, and the minion line shifted around her like a tide. Skeletons fell back into a defensive ring; the grey shapes hung at the perimeter. She was clearing the floor for the duel.

She was the size Luna remembered from the courtyard, but in here the height was different. There was no sky to put against her. She was the largest thing in the room.

Lunaris summed one of the potions Charlie made for her and downed it.

[Agility Potion]

Quality: 6-marvel

Effect: +200 Agility for 10 minutes

Info:Made by Queen Charlie and Scamantha™ with the help of [Ring of Alchemy]

Luna circled left. Rapier low. Longsword high. The agility from the potion had her moving at a speed the Death Knight could not match; she felt it in her feet.

She did not push.

The Death Knight watched her circle.

The first cut came from the Death Knight, and it was a heavy diagonal that Luna ducked under without breaking pace. The recovery came faster than Luna wanted; a pommel-strike folded into the same motion, and she sidestepped it; she felt the wind of the brass cap against her ear.

A real fighter. A great real fighter once.

“Ian,” Luna said.

Ian moved. Daggers low, the way he had learned to enter without telegraphing, and he came at the Death Knight from the back-right at an angle she would have to turn to address.

The Death Knight turned. Not fully. Just enough to bring the crossguard up, intercepted Ian’s first dagger on the steel and his second on the gauntlet, and the same motion brought her greatsword back around toward Luna.

Luna was already inside.

She put the rapier low; it skipped off plate near the hip. The longsword swept up in a wide arc that the Death Knight caught on the flat of her own blade and pushed away, and Luna was past her, on the other side, the cycle continuing.

The Death Knight tracked both of them now. Luna saw her eyes—pale violet, nothing in them—and saw the way her shoulders had to keep adjusting. Two angles at once. One was Luna’s speed. The other was Ian’s persistence.

“More,” Luna hissed.

The Death Knight lifted her free hand.

Two skeletons broke from the defensive ring and came forward at Ian. Bone armor, longswords. Coordinated.

The cost of giving an order during the duel was small, but it was there. Luna saw it. The shoulders dropped half an inch. The pale violet eyes lost focus on her for one half-step.

Luna used the half-step.

[Paradox Slash]

Two strikes in one breath. The longsword came down vertically, and the second strike came through the same line. The first cut hammered the pauldron at the neck joint. The second cut went through.

There was a moment when the gap at the Death Knight’s neck did not look different. The armor was still there. The seam looked closed.

Then it opened.

A thin line, perfectly clean, at the base of the helmet. Black tendrils of necrotic energy bled from it.

The Death Knight noticed.

Her greatsword came around in a strike that was not muscle memory; it was the will of the undead realizing it had been hurt. It came faster than the others. Luna got the longsword up. The strike came down with enough force that her boots slid backward on the marble.

The greatsword’s tip caught her left hip on the way past.

The mantle pulsed. Luna felt the silver weight under her armor flare and absorb, and the cut did not go through to the bone, but the impact was real. She felt the wet warmth of blood on her thigh inside her armor. She kept the rapier in her left hand. She kept her balance.

She did not reach for Slipstream.

She would not spend it here.

“Fty,” she said softly.

Fty’s eyes did not move from Lisa, but a thread of pale gold came across the chamber, found Luna’s hip, and the bleeding slowed.

But they weren’t the only ones who could do that. Veranthos, between necrobolts countering Lisa’s, sent something toward the apprentice and the wound started to heal. Yuki warned about it, but Luna forgot about it.

Damn!

“Ian. Skeletons.”

Ian was already on them. Two skeletons came apart under Quick-Draw rhythm in the time it took the Death Knight to help them.

Luna stepped back inside.

The slowly healing neck-gap was the only thing that mattered now. The Death Knight knew it; she dropped her chin and brought her greatsword guard high to protect it, and Luna had to work for the angle. The rapier slid up. The Death Knight blocked. The rapier slid up again. The Death Knight blocked.

Then Ian was there at her elbow.

His left dagger came up at the Death Knight’s wrist. The Death Knight turned to address it. Luna’s rapier went into the gap at her throat, and she pushed.

The rapier disappeared up to the crossguard.

The Death Knight stood for a long second. The pale violet in her eyes dimmed, and Luna let go of the rapier.

The apprentice fell forward; the rapier came out of her on the way down, and Luna caught it as the body hit the marble.

Around the chamber, the minions stopped knowing what they were doing.

The skeletons in the defensive ring kept their swords up but stopped moving. The grey shapes hesitated. A second-rank archer fired its bolt into a wall instead of at Lisa.

Luna let out a breath she had been holding.

She wiped the rapier on her own cloak.

“Ian. Mop up.”

“On it.”

Veranthos did not look at his apprentice falling. He did not turn his head. He kept his eyes on Lisa and his hand moved.

It moved a quarter-beat late.

The necroball that should have left his palm at the same instant as Lisa’s fireball left his palm a fraction after. The two casts crossed in the middle of the room and did not cancel. Lisa’s fireball broke against his ward with the full force it had been thrown with. His own ball, off-rhythm, sailed past her shoulder and broke against the wall.

Lisa did not understand for a half-second.

Then she did.

Her hands brightened.

She threw a firebolt at his right shoulder. Veranthos’s staff came up, and the dark mirror-bolt that left it was off-line by a degree, and Lisa’s bolt landed clean and burned through robe into the pale skin underneath.

He did not make a sound.

She threw a second one immediately. The staff came up again, and this one matched her bolt squarely, and they cancelled in the air. He had adjusted.

Lisa’s eyes were too bright now.

“He’s using the staff,” she said, half to Luna, half to herself.

“I see it.”

“He wasn’t using it before. He was just mirroring.” Her hands worked. A fireball, then a second fireball stacked behind it. The staff matched the first one. Lisa drove the second one in behind it and it broke against the staff itself; sparks running along the wood, the wood absorbing them, the wood not catching fire.

“Old,” Veranthos said pleasantly. “Designed for exactly this.”

He turned the staff sideways, struck the air with it, and a wall of darkness blossomed in the middle of the chamber.

Lisa threw a wall of fire to meet it. The two walls collided and held against each other; the chamber filled with the smell of burning, and the wrong sweetness of necromantic combustion, and neither wall gave.

Lisa pushed.

Veranthos pushed.

The walls held.

Katherine, who had been hammering at the bone armor through this entire exchange, took a hit she would not have taken five minutes ago. The greatsword Veranthos kept at his belt came up of its own accord and intercepted Katherine’s downstroke without his hand on it. The chip widened, but the strike behind Katherine’s swing didn’t land.

“Telekinesis,” Fty stated.

Katherine grinned through bloody teeth and reset her stance. Lisa’s wall of fire broke first. She had thrown it without thinking; he had thrown his without rushing.

She let it go.

“Big sis,” Luna said from across the chamber.

Lisa did not turn. Her hands were trembling now. Mana lines visible on her wrists where the skin had gone pale.

“Big sis,” Luna said again.

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not.”

“I will be.”

She took a breath. Threw a small fireball, the kind she used to kill annoying small monsters. Veranthos’s staff matched it without thought.

She threw a bigger one. The staff matched it.

She threw a column. The staff matched it.

She threw the flame-pillar that reached the ceiling and pressed against the stone. The staff produced a dark mirror-pillar that pressed back. Lisa’s pillar bowed. Veranthos’s did not.

Her hands shook harder.

“Big sis.”

“I know.”

“He’s wearing you out.”

“I KNOW. HE’S SO ANNOYING!”

Lisa’s voice cracked. Her eyes were red from the heat coming off her own hands, but it didn’t matter; the effect was the same. She stood at the edge of the chamber and her hands trembling and her hair clinging to the sweat on her neck, and Veranthos stood across from her perfectly composed.

She looked across the chamber.

Katherine, mid-strike, had paused for a half-second to grin at empty air. Not at anything in the chamber. At her stream feed. Even bleeding through her chestplate, she was performing.

Lisa let out a small, wet laugh.

“Right,” she muttered. “Right.”

She straightened. The trembling did not stop, but her stance settled. She threw a fireball.

He mirrored.

She threw another. Faster.

He mirrored. A quarter-second behind.

She threw another. Faster still.

The staff matched it, but the match arrived late, and Lisa’s ball clipped his robe before his cancelled and broke against the floor.

He noticed.

He adjusted.

She was already throwing the next one, and the next one, and the speed was rising, and the staff was keeping up, but it was working in a way it hadn’t had to work before. The chamber filled with the heat of two free-form fire-mages pushing against each other instead of one mage and her reflection.

Katherine took another strike on the chestplate. Fty’s gold lines arrived in time. The bone armor at Veranthos’s shoulder now had two cracks in it, both running long.

—

Luna watched the exchange…

She watched Lisa burning herself to find a moment, and Katherine bleeding to find a seam, and Fty stretched between the two of them at the edge of his range. She watched Ian sheathing his daggers, having mopped the last skeleton. She watched the bone armor that would eventually fail.

She watched Veranthos.

He had not moved from his spot. His robe had a single burn at the shoulder. His staff was working harder than it had at the start. His sword was fighting Katherine. His eyes were still mostly on Lisa.

He was still going to outlast them.

Luna looked across the chamber at Katherine.

Katherine was mid-strike, greatsword on the upswing. She felt the look before she saw it. Her head came around, blood at the corner of her mouth, and Luna held her eyes for the half-second it took.

Katherine grinned.

She pulled back from the strike. Set her boots. Sword forward, two-handed, blade angled at Veranthos’s chest.

The aura came off her.

“[Glorious Fight].”

The air over the marble thickened past the point Fty’s buff lines could reach, and Luna felt the temperature shift across the chamber, and the chamber felt smaller. The dust at the edges of the floor lifted an inch and stayed.

Veranthos’s eyes, for the first time in the fight, left Lisa, and they found Katherine.

He smiled.

It was a small smile, and he raised his free hand. A pulse left him. Luna saw it as a faint dark wave that rolled outward from his palm, passed through the chamber walls, and was gone. For one second the room felt empty.

Then the empty filled.

Mana began to flow back to him along the line the pulse had taken; dark threads of it sliding through the stone of the walls into his upraised hand.

Lisa’s hands stopped glowing for half a second.

“He killed undead outside to get mana,” she said. Then, louder, across the chamber: “Luna—that’s what the dead zone is. It’s his battery.”

Veranthos grinned. “More,” he said.

The skeletons Luna had killed came back. She saw them rise from the marble in the same coordinated formation. Behind them, more. The chamber had two ranks of skeletons it had not had before, and a third line was rising at the back of the room.

Luna stopped counting at thirty.

“Ian.”

“Yeah.”

“With me. Just sword work.”

“Got it.”

Fty’s staff turned. His next buff line came across the chamber and landed on Katherine in a thick gold weave that Luna had not seen him produce before. Strength, agility, durability; all three at once. The gold wrapped her like a second skin and went into the aura.

Katherine took a step forward.

The bone armor at Veranthos’s shoulder cracked further.

Lisa’s hands had come back up. Her fire was different now; what came off her hands was raw fire shaped by intent alone, a hand-shape of flame that closed around Veranthos’s left arm and held.

Veranthos’s staff came up.

He traced something in the air above the staff with his free hand, and Lisa’s hand-shape unraveled from the inside, intent separating from form, and what reached him was just heat.

He took the heat, and his robe at the shoulder smoked.

“Mana is a substrate,” he said. “The shape is a contract. You are throwing me contracts. I am declining to sign them.”

Lisa threw a spear of fire that did not have a contract at all; just the intent to be inside him. The staff unraveled it three meters from his face.

Lisa swore.

—

Two skeletons came at Luna at the same angle. She took the left one through the visor with the rapier and the right one’s collarbone with the longsword, but the second rank came forward without giving her a half-step to recover, and the rapier did not have time to come out before the next skeleton was at her hip.

She rolled the hip. The rapier came free. She killed the third skeleton on the way past.

“Ian.”

“Left.”

He was already there. Two skeletons came apart under his daggers in the time it took her to get the longsword up again. The fourth skeleton lined up, and she killed it.

Behind her, across the chamber, Katherine was carving.

Luna registered it in flashes between her own strikes. Under Fty’s gold-weave buff, Katherine had become something else. The aura of [Glorious Fight] ran through her like a current, and she was no longer hammering the bone armor; she was placing strikes. The greatsword came down at the same point three times in a row, and the bone at Veranthos’s chest cracked along the seam Luna’s eye had been watching.

Veranthos’s own sword—telekinetically held—was fighting Katherine. The blade wove in the air to her left, came down at her shoulder, caught her on the pauldron. Katherine grunted, but shugged it off and brought her own blade across in a horizontal sweep that caught the floating sword on the flat and sent it spinning.

“BIG BAD!” Katherine roared. “BIG GOOD DAY! DONATE TO RIMEBREAK!”

The sword corrected and came back at her.

She caught it with her gauntlet.

Veranthos was fighting on three fronts now. Telekinetic sword on Katherine. Unraveling-magic on Lisa. The ambient mana flow from outside refilled the reserves no matter how much Lisa burned.

He was, somehow, still composed.

He was also, Luna noticed, teaching.

Snatches of it reached her between skeletons. He was speaking to Lisa as he countered her. “A construct of mana requires three anchor points. You give me only two.” Unravel. “The third is what stabilizes it through hostile fields—” Unravel. “—if you wish to penetrate ward fields you must close the triad before the cast leaves your hand—” Unravel. “—what you do is competent, but it is undergraduate.”

Lisa’s hair was standing up from the heat coming off her own hands.

She did not answer him. She threw faster.

“BIG GOOD DAY, BIG GOOD DAY!” Katherine yelled again, mostly for the stream. The greatsword came up two-handed. She stepped into Veranthos’s guard. The bone armor at his chest had four cracks now, all running long, all crossing. The seam was a starburst.

She was setting up.

—

Luna took a skeleton through the throat and stepped back to give herself the second of room she needed to look across the chamber.

Katherine was grinning. Blood on her teeth. The aura column was pulsing now, contracting toward her, pulling inward from the chamber as if it were folding itself into one strike. Fty’s three gold lines were stretched taut against the column’s pull, fraying at the edges.

Katherine raised the greatsword above her head.

She paused.

She looked at the camera Luna could not see, somewhere above her left shoulder.

She grinned wider.

“THIS IS GLORIOUS FIGHT! THIS IS RIMEBREAK KINGDOM!”

The greatsword came down.

Luna saw it from across the room and her perimeter went out of her head for a second. The aura collapsed into the blade. The blade collapsed into the strike. The strike came down in a vertical line.

[Judgment]

It split the bone armor from helm to breastplate in a single line Luna could see from where she stood, a thin starlight crack that opened and then kept opening, and the cracking sound that came after was a full second behind the strike itself, as if the chamber had needed the time to register what had happened.

Veranthos staggered.

The staff fell.

He looked at Katherine with his ordinary brown eyes.

He folded.

—

Katherine was still standing for a second.

Then her knees gave out. The greatsword stayed up; she planted the blade in the marble and held herself on the hilt. The aura was gone.

She looked at Luna.

She grinned. Bloody.

“Big save day,” she said. “Best day.”

She found the camera somewhere above her left shoulder and gave it a thumbs-up. The thumb shook.

“See you in Tower!”

Her body slumped against the greatsword. The something that had been Katherine left, in a way Luna had never quite figured out how to describe, and then there was a fountain of loot.

The chamber was silent.

Lisa let out a breath.

Ian sheathed both daggers.

“Thanks, Kath,” Luna said to the air. Her hand was still on the rapier grip, and it went still there.

The system had not given her anything.

No XP notification. No level-up flash. No loot drop. The marble where Veranthos had folded was just marble, with a body on it, and the staff a meter away.

“Uh,” Luna said. “Guys.”

Lisa had walked toward Veranthos’s body. She had two more steps before the staff.

“I haven’t got a notification.”

Lisa stopped.

Fty turned.

The staff scraped on the stone.

It rolled slowly toward Veranthos’s hand. Veranthos’s hand was open on the marble. The staff arrived at it, and the fingers closed.

The body rose.

It rose evenly, drawn upward as though the staff had a hold on it and was simply lifting. The wound across the chest knitted back together from helm to navel in the same instant. By the time his feet were under him, the bone armor was reforming over the seam, and the staff was upright in his hand.

He breathed in.

The brown eyes were still brown.

“Did you think I had not prepared?” he said in his calm voice. “I have spent fifty years on this question. You imagined I was possessed because the alternative is harder. The alternative is that I made this. The alternative is that there is no parasite to free, no curse to break, no story to redeem. I am exactly what I made myself.”

He looked at Lisa.

“Your fire will not reach me.”

He looked at Fty.

“Your healing will not harm me.”

He looked at Luna.

“Your blade will not finish me.”

He raised the staff slightly.

“I have conquered death.”