139 - Darkness Elemental
Alexandra stayed quick on her feet as she dodged the Silver darkness elemental attacks. Long shadow limbs extended from the monster, reaching for her head, her arms, her legs. When they missed, the limbs retracted into the elemental that was floating around the room.
She started with Inflict Weakness and felt it settle on her opponent. Good, with the semi-ethereal properties of the monster, she hadn’t been certain it would work.
Then, while ducking below another shadow arm, she pushed even more solar mana into Light. The room flashed in bright heat to the point it was starting to bother her. Underground, the heat had nowhere to go and was quickly turning the room into an oven.
Still, she kept her skill active. The elemental was clearly suffering from it. Only, she wasn’t sure if it was the heat or the light that was bothering it. Whatever the case, the elemental was slower than it should be, and she used that to thread a sliver of mana toward it, starting Drain Life and Aggressive Assimilation at the same time.
The timer had started. Now she just had to survive until the vast lifeforce of the elemental depleted.
But winning life wasn’t why Alexandra had set out to hunt today. Lost as she might be, she hadn’t forgotten her original goal to solidify her combat prowess against Silvers.
She took a chance when two shadow limbs surrounded her, trying to pull her toward the elemental. With her sword, she sliced one in half. It gave without resistance, and she escaped through the gap.
Focused, she didn’t notice the frown etching itself on her face. The shadow limbs were tangible. She knew that if she got hit, she would feel it. But the way they interacted with her sword was weird. It was like the elemental could turn them ethereal at will.
If it could do that with its body, she didn’t know how she would kill it.
Using the short window when the limbs were retracting into the shadow, she fired a Solar Blast. The spell washed over the darkness elemental. It screeched, but through her link with its lifeforce, Alexandra could tell it hadn’t taken much damage. At best, it was uncomfortable, which simply wasn’t enough.
As she was about to fire a second spell, Alexandra felt the pull on her mana threads and remembered that she couldn’t afford to be as liberal with her spending as she was on the surface. She couldn’t rely on her bloodline down here, so she had to be careful. Considering the Solar Blast hadn’t done much, she decided against using it.
Then, in an effort to preserve even more mana and feeling that she could afford it, she lowered the intensity of Light.
The room dimmed, and the elemental calmed down. The heat was still there, trapped with them, but Alexandra felt a chill travel down her spine.
“Shit.”
She spun, avoiding a strike from a limb faster than she’d seen the elemental move from the start of the fight. Just as she landed, she had to move again to dodge another, then another.
The dance continued in a silence so total that only Alexandra’s pants were breaking. The darkness was heavy, yet when its strike hit the wall, they simply turned into shadows sliding against the rock.
Alexandra cut a limb with disturbing ease, and it dissolved into her Light. What was the effect of Aggressive Assimilation again?
She couldn’t quite catch it. She knew her skills had landed, and that she was siphoning something from the elemental, but she couldn’t tell what it was.
Since solar magic wouldn’t cut it, Alexandra was forced to rely on her sword.
She gritted her teeth while she looked for an opening. “I didn’t put all that effort into merging that damned skill for nothing.”
Slowly, she sliced and dodged her way toward the elemental. The humanoid shadow wasn’t moving, making it easier for her. When she got in range, she planted her sword right where the heart would have been if the thing had been human.
It didn’t move, didn’t try to dodge. Her sword simply went into the darkness on one side and came out on the other. No resistance.
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Nothing.
Alexandra pulled back immediately, taking a hit to the side as her opponent tried to pull her closer.
Three steps back, a wince of pain. She observed.
The darkness elemental still hadn’t moved, seemingly unbothered by the hole she’d carved into its body.
Alexandra clicked her tongue. This result was within her expectations. It had been the same for all elementals. If she couldn’t attack the source, it would simply control more darkness to attack her.
And this cave was mostly darkness. Unlike for her hunts on the surface, she had no idea where the source was. In fact, she couldn’t detect a single thread of mana attached to the shadow figure.
She fell back into the dance. Dodge, cut, slice, move. Inflict Weakness again, layered over the first, mana thin as thread through her fingers. The elemental's limbs didn't slow. If anything, they came faster, three at once, then four.
A shadow arm caught her shoulder, a full strike, knuckles of darkness closing around bone. Pain lanced down to her elbow. She grunted. Been through worse.
She twisted free before the second arm found her ribs, but only barely.
“Fine.” Her voice came out ragged. “Fine, we do this the hard way.”
She tried Solar Blast again, mana cost be damned. The spell hit and the elemental barely flinched, the screech from before reduced now to nothing at all. It had adapted. Or maybe it had never cared to begin with, and the screech had been theater.
A limb took the long way to sneak around her and clipped her calf. She stumbled, caught herself on one knee, and rolled away from the follow-up strike that disappeared through the stone where she’d knelt.
Drain Life was still active, its thread humming under her perception, but when she checked the flow it told her nothing had changed. Elementals had too much lifeforce.
She switched tactics again.
Life Curse.
Dark Bolt.
A low-power one to test the waters. She didn’t want a sickness to plague her. Not anywhere, not ever, but especially not here and now.
Dark Bolt’s needle flew from the tip of her finger and pierced the shadow. Still nothing changed. The elemental floated on, patient, its limbs finding her twice more before she managed to put distance between them.
She couldn’t sense the hint of a trace of corruption in the elemental’s lifeforce, as if Dark Bolt hadn’t hit. Yet, she could feel the curse she’d traded for it, both her thumbs turning stiff as wood. Not too bad.
Perhaps she could try a stronger Dark Bolt next, but with no guarantee that it would do anything, it wasn’t a risk she was willing to take.
“Come on.” She circled left, sword low. “There has to be something.”
She struck directly this time, no aiming for a heart that didn't exist, just cutting wide and deep through the center of the shadow. The blade passed through without resistance, same as before, and the limb that answered hit her on the back before she'd finished the swing.
She went down hard, palms first, the impact jarring up through her wrists. She was up again before the next limb reached her, but slower than she wanted to be.
The elemental didn’t move. It never did.
Light, full intensity again. She didn't care about the mana anymore. The room went hot, the air thick enough to taste, and still the elemental only slowed by degrees, not enough to matter, not enough to change anything.
A limb wrapped her ankle. She hacked it off in a single stroke and felt the phantom weight dissolve against her leg, already re-forming somewhere behind her.
"What are you?" She wasn't asking it. She wasn't sure why she was asking. It was a darkness elemental, the very thing she had set out to hunt, the reason she was lost deep underground.
And she wasn’t even winning.
Another hit landed, glancing off her hip, and she stumbled into range of a second before she'd recovered from the first. She twisted out of it half-successfully, took the strike on her forearm instead of her throat, and heard herself gasp at the impact.
Solar Blast, Inflict Weakness, the mana bleeding out of Light… None of it had bought her anything. She was breathing harder than an hour of sparring should have earned, and the elemental hadn't slowed, hadn't tired, hadn't given her the slightest hint of where its source was.
“What else?” she murmured.
At this point, the only things she could think of were to somehow enchant her blade so it started working on the elemental, to come up with a custom spell, or to buy a skill from the contribution point shop.
The first two were easier said than done. As for the third, she didn’t have the luxury to take out her journal, read it, and focus her intent enough to get a good skill out of it. If such skill existed in the first place. Something to find the source of a darkness elemental… But Tracking was supposed to be doing that, and it clearly wasn’t helping.
A moment of inattention. Her guard slipping for just an instant. That was all the elemental needed to latch onto Alexandra’s throat with a limb.
She struggled, grasping for air as the shadow figure lifted her, bringing her face in front of its absence of one. She planted her sword in its torso.
It did nothing.
Then it was the shadow’s turn.
A limb materialized out of its torso, and with a swift and decisive motion, it dove it straight into Alexandra’s heart.