Ch 197 – War = Fast Improvement
A day and a half had passed since the Ravenlight Party began their ascent through Floor Eleven, and Deacon had continued to fight without pause against the seemingly never-ending Lizardkiin army that kept emerging from deeper within the marsh, wave after wave of scaled warriors throwing themselves at him with reckless abandon that spoke more to religious fervor than tactical sense.
However, as a result of his relentless aggression and refusal to fall back toward the Eastern Gate no matter how many enemies surrounded him, he'd managed to draw a large majority of the Lizardkiin army's attention directly onto himself and drag their focus away from the fortress, which had been his intention from the moment he'd dove into their ranks a day and a half ago.
Carving a blue-scaled Lizardkiin warrior cleanly in two from shoulder to hip, Deacon swiftly launched himself away from where he had been standing atop the surface of the marsh water.
His boots barely touched the liquid before he was airborne again, narrowly avoiding a sharp, jagged pillar of twisted roots that shot up from beneath the murky water where he had stood, conjured by a Lizardkiin shaman hiding somewhere nearby in the reeds.
While still in the air with his momentum carrying him upward, Deacon brought the Ulfberht form of Echoform Reliquary down in a powerful diagonal slash, pushing the orange flames wreathing the blade outward to extend well beyond the steel itself and spreading the fire in a wide arc that rained down on the many Lizardkiin swarming him from every direction in a full three hundred and sixty degree area around his position.
Roars and growls of pain from the burning Lizardkiin continued to assault Deacon's ears even over the roar of his flames spreading across the marsh water and igniting the scattered corpses floating in it, and he began his descent back down into the hip-deep water where countless more Lizardkiin warriors were waiting for him with weapons raised and murder in their yellow slitted reptilian eyes.
As he fell through the air, Deacon's left hand reached into one of the pouches strapped to his hip and pulled out a cobalt-blue pill, one of the Lesser Titanblood Tonics that Bonehead had concocted, and he popped his second dose of the day into his mouth and swallowed it dry.
In the five seconds it took for Deacon's boots to touch back down on top of the marsh water, his muscles swelled noticeably beneath his Barbarian Armor Set while his entire frame grew an additional two inches in height, bringing him to just over six feet tall and making the armor plates shift themselves to accommodate his temporarily enlarged physique.
Landing atop the hip-high waters in this particular section of the marsh that he'd been steadily fighting his way through, focusing all his attention on the fresh wave of Lizardkiin warriors rushing toward him through the curtain of flames he'd created moments before, their spears crying out for his blood.
Standing his ground as they closed in, Deacon let Echoform Reliquary split back into its twin short swords. He went straight to work, cutting through scales and flesh, knocking aside spear thrusts and batting away claw swipes as his arms blurred and he hacked through the Lizardkiin rushing him head-on.
While he fought, Deacon began casting weak but plentiful Flame Mines directly onto the bodies of the Lizardkiin he killed, gradually angling eastward to put enough distance between himself and the growing cluster of mines so he would not get caught in the blast when he detonated them.
With Blood Sense active, Deacon’s eyes constantly darted in their sockets as the spell informed him of every living being with blood within his detection range. With the added help of his Talisman of the Inner Mind, which had somehow survived the destruction of Solomon’s Fourth Temple and ended up back inside his Spatial Sling Bag afterward, its Heightened Senses allowed him to track everyone and everything around him with near-perfect accuracy.
The combination of both abilities working in tandem helped him dodge and slip between the many spear thrusts coming at him from all directions simultaneously while also allowing him to maintain constant offensive pressure, never giving the Lizardkiin surrounding him a moment to process what had just happened to the Lizardkiin before it before they found themselves dead.
Whipping his right short sword upward in a rising arc, Deacon sliced cleanly through the left forearm of the red-scaled Lizardkiin warrior directly in front of him, severing the limb at the elbow and sending it spinning away through the air still gripping its spear, and before the creature could even process what had happened Deacon's blade reversed direction and came around in a tight curved arc that sliced straight through the Lizardkiin's thick neck, beheading it and sending the head tumbling into the water with a splash.
In the same motion of a rising arc, his right short sword came up to parry two more spear thrusts that had been aimed at his right eye and throat from warriors attacking from his right flank, while simultaneously his left short sword swept backward to parry and deflect four additional spear thrusts coming at him from his left side and from directly behind him where Lizardkiin had managed to wade through their dead companions to get within striking range.
However, just as Deacon was preparing to launch himself into the air again, feeling the water beneath his boots begin to rumble and shift as the area roughly two hundred meters from his position suddenly grew heavy with concentrated nature mana, his eyes widened slightly in genuine surprise at what he saw rising from the marsh.
His surprise was not caused by the hundreds upon hundreds of Lizardkiin warriors filling every visible stretch of the marsh, as far as he could see in every direction, with roughly half of them charging toward his position while a slightly larger contingent laid siege to the Eastern Gate behind him. Instead, it was drawn to the massive structure made of thick, mangrove-like roots that was rapidly rising from beneath the water.
And it wasn't the only one appearing either, because as Deacon's gaze swept across the battlefield, he could see dozens of similar root structures beginning to rise all across the marshlands simultaneously, each one erupting from the murky mud-water and climbing toward the sky.
By the time he used Air Step to propel himself toward the nearest mangrove-like root structure, which had taken on the general shape of a tapering capital letter “A” and had already reached roughly thirty meters in height with no sign of slowing its growth, Deacon noticed something else.
Inside the hollow center of the strange A-shaped root tower were six Lizardkiin shamans, their bodies pierced in multiple places and seemingly fused to the roots, effectively turning them into living batteries for whatever massive shamanistic ritual they were fueling.
Along the outside of the tower structure, positioned at various heights and clinging to the roots with their powerful tails and clawed feet, were dozens of Lizardkiin archers who had already begun drawing their bows and taking aim at him as he approached through the air.
Swiping his left short sword in a quick horizontal arc in front of his face, Deacon knocked aside an arrow aimed straight at his head that would have taken him between the eyes if he had been any slower.
Kicking off the air and shooting toward the Lizardkiin archer who had fired it, closing the distance in a heartbeat and taking the creature’s head off with his right short sword just as his boots touched down on the same thick root the archer had been perched on.
Just a second after Deacon landed on the root ledge and nudged the archer’s headless body into the marsh below, every visible root tower across the battlefield began to glow with an eerie, sickly red, including the one he stood on.
At that exact moment, dozens of loud voices began humming and chanting in unison, reciting what was clearly a complex shamanic spell in a Lizardkiin tongue Deacon neither recognized nor understood.
As Deacon began rappelling himself downward along the outside of the root tower to get closer to the shamans trapped inside its hollow center, the massive army of Lizardkiin warriors down below in the marsh began to roar in unison with their shamans, but unlike their normal battle roars these new sounds were considerably sharper and more piercing, almost like the shrieking cries of wyverns rather than anything a ground-bound lizard should be capable of producing.
Poking his head over the edge of the root to look down at the sea of Lizardkiin gathered below the tower, Deacon saw that they had begun climbing the structure hand over hand, their claws digging deep into the bark as they scaled it. As if that were not bad enough, their bodies were visibly growing larger and more muscular as their scales similarly began bulging outward like a porcupine bristling its quills.
"Never fucking mind," Deacon muttered to himself as he immediately abandoned his plan to climb down inside the tower and kill the shamans, instead taking several steps backward and using both his short swords to carve a rough opening through the thick roots before kicking off into the air and using a series of rapid Air Steps to climb vertically until he was hovering a couple dozen meters higher than the root tower he’d exited from.
From his elevated position, Deacon could see the full scope of the Lizardkiin army spread out beneath him. He reached into his Spatial Sling Bag and pulled out one of the wooden crates Bonehead had packed with Undead Miasma Bombs, the specialized alchemical weapons they had started calling U.M.B.s during their planning discussions before arriving on Floor Eleven.
Grabbing one of the spherical bombs from the crate, Deacon pressed his thumb firmly against the circular activation button built into its surface and dropped it straight down. He immediately reached for another, activated it, and hurled it in a different direction to maximize the spread.
As Deacon continued activating the U.M.B.s and dropping them at different points across the endless swarm of Lizardkiin warriors below, the bombs landed in the marsh water or bounced off living Lizardkiin and floating corpses alike. A second later, the side panels of each sphere snapped open and began violently spewing thick clouds of concentrated undead miasma that spread rapidly in every direction, contaminating the air and the water at the same time.
From there, the miasma seeped into the Lizardkiin through their lungs and through their scales wherever they came into contact with the contaminated water. Depending on each Lizardkin’s Vitality stat and resistance to toxins, the miasma would either kill them outright by inflicting necrotic damage on their internal organs or begin transforming them into undead versions of themselves, which would then turn on their unnatural and unstable rebirth as an undead.
Unfortunately, because of the sheer number of U.M.B.s Deacon was deploying across this stretch of marsh, the contamination he was spreading would render the entire area in front of the Eastern Gate uninhabitable for anyone who was not undead or who had not built up a resistance to undead miasma as he had by being around Bonehead for eight years. With the number of corpses already floating in the water, and the many more about to join them, the marsh would likely remain a toxic dead zone for a very long time, possibly forever, unless someone with significant magical power came through and performed extensive purification rituals.
But that particular problem wasn't something Deacon or Bonehead needed to concern themselves with, because it would be something these NPCs would have to deal with long after the Ravenlight Party had moved on to Floor Twelve if they still lingered about.
Glancing back in the direction of the Eastern Gate while he continued dropping bombs, Deacon could see similar massive clouds of dark purple and black miasma ascending from the area directly in front of the fortress walls and rising up into the sky where they mixed with the natural fog that perpetually hung over the marsh.
Looks like Bonehead had the same idea I did, Deacon thought to himself with grim satisfaction.
Still standing on air, his head beginning to ache from the strain of maintaining Air Step for longer than a second at a time, Deacon finally released the now-empty wooden crate that had held the U.M.B.s and let it drop into the contaminated marsh below. At the same time, he shifted Echoform Reliquary back into its single-bladed Ulfberht configuration and reached to his hip to draw Veladoros, the Holy Longsword he had received as a reward for killing the Holy Pontiff on Floor Eight.
With Echoform Reliquary gripped firmly in his right hand and Veladoros held in his left, Deacon stopped maintaining his Air Stepping technique and allowed gravity to take hold of him, plummeting straight down toward the root tower and the transformed Lizardkiin warriors climbing up its sides to reach him.
As he fell, Deacon activated Power Boost and pushed it to 10%, causing his muscles to swell even further, and simultaneously, he activated the enchantments on both swords, causing Echoform Reliquary's blade and Veladoros to both ignite with brilliant holy fire.