Chapter 487
Chapter 487
For the next several minutes, he simply darted from spot to spot, doing his best to dodge the spears of dark energy raining down. To keep the Titan distracted from him, after D was swallowed, Jake had summoned several nearby wyrmcallers and had them deploy most of his combat units, wingclaws, crawlers, and blastfiends, to keep the Titan’s attention off him.
The swarm hit the massive creature from every direction, forcing it to focus on them instead of Jake. After the vortex-like portals finally vanished and the barrage of spears of dark energy ceased raining down, Jake turned his full attention to the Titan. He employed the same tactic D had, crawling all over its enormous human-like torso and pausing long enough to deal damage.
He drove his drills into the Titan’s exterior, boring holes through its armor and creating structural weak points, making follow-up attacks there much more powerful. This was possible thanks to a specific upgrade to his Drill Gauntlets ability. After creating a structural weakness, he would exploit it by pounding his smashfists against it, dealing significant damage to the Titan.
And all the while, his crawlers and wingclaws attacked the monster from all sides, while his blastfiends crawled all over its body, their sacks bursting and splattering acid over the Titan’s chitinous armor, weakening it and making it more vulnerable to damage.
For the next several minutes, Jake and his combat units kept attacking the Titan. While it was a slow process, the Titan gradually sustained damage, its strength and vitality waning. Sure enough, some of his creatures died in the battle. It was inevitable. But the Titan was clearly losing, and it was just a matter of time before it succumbed to its wounds and died.
At one point, when Jake was at the center of the Titan’s chest, he suddenly felt tremors coming from inside the monster’s human-like torso. He glanced below him in time to see something burst out from the lower part of the Titan’s body in an explosion of black ichor.
Sure enough, it was D. With his body halfway out of the Titan’s body, he took a second to look around and get his bearings.
Took you long enough, Jake joked mentally.
D had come out facing downward, so he turned to look up and saw Jake clinging to the Titan’s body slightly above where he had emerged. They eyed each other for a second. Then D gave him a nod, and Jake nodded back.
D then sprouted four scythe-blades from his back and, using them as legs, stabbed the tips into the Titan’s exterior as he began to climb up the monster’s body. His power boots and claws were still inactive, so he resorted to his natural tools and weapons to move and fight. Jake immediately noticed how much slower D was without the boots. It figured.
As Jake watched his counterpart attack the Titan, he couldn’t help but notice that his strikes lacked their usual power. His counterpart seemed tired, and there could be only one explanation for that. He had to be running dangerously low on mana, so his body must have employed the safeguard mechanism to ensure mana was used solely to sustain him, for his basic survival, without distributing any to power up his attacks.
The monster still seemed stunned by what had just happened, standing still as black ichor kept pouring from the ragged hole in its torn stomach. However, when D delivered a blow to the patch of the Titan’s exterior that had been weakened by one of Jake’s blastfiends not long ago and punched a hole right through the armor, the Titan suddenly sprang into action. It slapped at D with one of its hands, like a person swatting at a bothersome fly. He attempted to dart away, but his scythe-blades were too slow. The Titan grabbed D, clenching him in its huge fist.
There was nothing Jake could do to help his counterpart, so he just watched. The Titan brought D to its face, and for a moment, it seemed like it was going to swallow him again. But it did something else instead. Spreading its jaws wide to emit a thunderous roar, the monster drew back its arm and hurled D to the ground with great force.
He didn’t even have enough mana to curl into a ball. Still, the impact against the ground covered with organic matter wasn’t enough to deal any serious damage to him. He immediately jumped to his feet and turned to face the Titan. But before he could rush toward it, the monster employed the last of its special abilities: Gravity Well.
With a hideous shriek, the Titan conjured what looked like a sphere of dark energy several yards behind D. It just hovered about six feet over the ground. At first glance, it didn’t seem dangerous. However, in the next moment, it activated its effects. D had been able to make only a few steps toward the Titan when he suddenly stopped making progress, even though his legs were still moving.
It looked almost comical, as if he were running on a treadmill. Jake realized the soles of D’s feet weren’t making contact with the ground. He was hovering an inch or so above it and kept moving upward. In the next second, the speed of his ascent suddenly increased, and he floated to a height of six feet above the ground.
He floated in the same spot as if caught in zero gravity. His arms were flailing and his legs were kicking, but he was unable to move from that spot. He was absolutely helpless there. It looked like it was up to Jake to save him. The Titan began to walk toward its trapped prey, evidently intending to either stomp on D or skewer him with its stinger.
But Jake wasn’t going to let that happen. He instructed all his combat units to focus on dealing damage to the monster’s head, hoping it would distract the Titan from D. Then he pushed off its body, launching himself toward the zero-gravity field his counterpart wallowed in.
A moment later, Jake himself got caught in the field, floating motionlessly six feet above the ground. He fired his grappling hook at a spot far behind the black sphere and reeled himself out of the field. The instant he dropped back to the ground, he turned toward D, fired the hook again, and latched onto him. With a hard pull, he yanked his counterpart free of the sphere’s effective range.
D stood next to Jake, staring at him intently. Jake found himself wondering what was going through his counterpart’s head at the moment.
Then he heard a soft whirring sound behind him. Feral Instincts remained silent, but he still spun around quickly, ready for any danger. There was nothing harmful, though. He saw a small round drone fly toward the two of them, coming to a halt about two feet away. D wasn’t surprised to see the drone.
“Owen, you’re dangerously low on mana,” the familiar voice emanated from the drone’s loudspeakers. “You should let our friend here finish the Titan off on his own.”
When D sharply turned his head to look at the drone, the voice quickly added, “You should preserve what little mana you still have. Don’t feel bad about that. You’ve already done most of the work, buddy. The Titan’s barely holding on now, and it’s all thanks to you. Now let our friend handle the rest, shall we?”
D turned to look at Jake. Jake gave him a nod. Owen didn’t return it. He just kept staring at him. It was hard to tell what Owen was thinking, but Jake got the sense that his counterpart didn’t like the idea of staying put and letting someone else finish the fight.
Still, when Jake rushed forward again, Owen stayed where he was. As he charged after the Titan, he saw the monster suddenly turn and begin to move away. Apparently, it had decided it had had enough. Sure enough, Jake wasn’t willing to let it go. He quickly caught up to the retreating monster and resumed his assault.
After several minutes of constantly taking damage from numerous angles as Jake and his combat units tore into it, the Titan finally seemed to break. It swung its tail toward its own body, impaling one of Jake’s crawlers. Sure enough, it also dealt damage to itself in the process.
The Titan continued stabbing itself in various spots again and again, trying to kill every single little bugger crawling over it. Finally, after driving its stinger into its own body one last time, the Titan’s entire form convulsed. A moment later, it collapsed with a thunderous crash that shook the street and the buildings on either side.
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Enemy Killed. +225,425 XP
XP: 471,775 / 255,600
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Level Up. 191 → 192
+5 SP
XP: 216,175 / 262,800
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Jake jumped from the corpse of the fallen monster to the ground. He then instructed one of his wingclaws to cut a piece from the Titan’s body and bring it back to the Apex Hollow. Jake was really interested in what kind of genetic material he could harvest from the Titan.
Next, he instructed his wyrmcallers to descend from the skies so his surviving combat units could return to his lairs. Once that was done, he mentally instructed the wyrmcallers to return to their regular patrol routes over Dead City and started walking toward D. The drone was gone, but his counterpart was still there, waiting.
Jake came to a stop a couple of paces away. For a moment, they just stared at each other. Then Owen signaled for Jake to follow him and broke into a run. Jake followed. For the next several minutes, they navigated through the city, heading southeast until they reached the tall wall surrounding it.
D glanced at Jake to make sure he was beside him, then sprouted four scythe-blades and began to scale the wall. While he didn’t have much mana left, this particular ability obviously didn’t require much mana to use, allowing him to employ it.
As they scaled the wall, the Ravage Contamination attempted to stop them from escaping the city, sprouting whip-like tentacles and lashing out at them. They failed to stop them, though. Taking care of the tentacles, Jake and D continued their ascent until they finally reached the top.
They then simply jumped off, landing on the other side and taking no fall damage. They moved some distance away from the wall to get out of reach of its tentacles.
D then pointed at something in the distance. Jake glanced that way and saw a futuristic-looking helicopter resting on the ground, its rotor blades spinning.
Owen proceeded toward the waiting helicopter. Jake followed.