The morbs activated and unleashed torrents of fire, earth and water which brushed away the remnants of the golden barrier and then mixed together in various ways.
Fire and water created a mist that vaporized the incoming black tendrils. Fire and earth united into countless oversized glass shards that left huge rents in the Devourer as they flew through, though they were quickly mended. Earth and water created enormous trees, the roots of which began greedily drinking in the liquid darkness of the devourer before they withered away and died.
The magic attack of the Mage Kings simply didn't stop. They continuously summoned morbs as they pressed the Devourer.
The Dark King, on the other hand, was responsible for defense. A black liquid shield appeared around the Mage Kings which seemed to effortlessly neutralize the High Assassin's morbs.
With his attacks against the Kings thwarted, the High Assassin turned his attention to easier targets. He shadow-stepped into the middle of the specter army and began lopping off limbs and heads, his attacks not even slowed by the tanks spectral plate mail or shields. Ectoplasmic remains rained down across the battlefield as the High Assassin continued his rampage, finding no real opponent.
I was momentarily mesmerized as he used a skill similar to Bear's typhoon, became a tornado of darkness, and dashed forward, killing a dozen specters in the blink of an eye. The next moment, he was already running toward the Mage Kings. The liquid darkness running down the blades was flung off as he ran forward, and each specter struck by it screamed in pain.
At that moment, I realized everything I'd faced up until this point had been easy by comparison. If I'd faced anything like the High Assassin before...
Of course, as this was happening the armies hadn't stood still, the specters were marching forward in formation to attack, and the drow were preparing to meet them. Thousands of drow appeared standing on the first two tiers of the Dark Temple, obscuring the view of the Devourer with the massed fire of their bows and crossbows. Spells of every element arced across the battlefield everywhere and the clash of melee fighters was deafening.
A massive purple portal appeared over the specter army and disgorged a twenty meter long black octopus. I couldn't tell if it was fighting or just thrashing desperately as it suddenly found itself on land, but it was killing specters by the score either way. Portals appeared above the Dark Temple as well, summoning everything from a fiery phoenix to small blue orbs that seemed to warp around, leaving gaping holes in the drow they moved past.
I was hit by an ice AoE and frozen in place for five seconds.
There was no way to run from battle; Blackguards who had previously been invisible or hiding in buildings appeared and assaulted the specter's flanks. Summoned beasts were now everywhere.
Strangely enough, in the middle of the chaos of battle, where I wouldn't stand out, was where I was the safest.
All I had to do was live through this and the most dangerous part of my plan would be complete.
36. Cozy Inside
The ghostly heads from the siege engines approached the drow, intent on killing them, but were destroyed by enemy magic. Unlike the way they had slaughtered the thralls, this time the heads killed at most one or two people before being neutralized.
Over one hundred Buffaloes appeared among the specters; just like before it was as if they had always been there, simply shrouded by an illusion. They plowed into the densely packed ranks of drow, then exploded with that same green energy. To spite the drow's best efforts to evade, between the charge and the explosions they must have suffered hundreds of injuries and fatalities.
I stopped paying attention after that, too focused on defending myself for anything else. Sadly, the Kill to Survive spell wasn't triggering enough to make a difference; for the skill to trigger, I had to deal more than forty-five percent damage to someone before he died, and in this chaotic battle, that was almost impossible. I attacked whoever was in front of me and that was changing rapidly enough that I never had a chance to concentrate my damage on any of them.
A Blackguard shadowed in front of me and nearly bypassed my defense when another shadow stopped him.
That's when the black sun pulsed. Like a still heart suddenly beating a single time, it swelled, contracted and spurted jets of black liquid across the battlefield.
The Mage Kings' shifted their spells into some kind of elemental vortex that shielded the surrounding area. The cone of magic channeled the darkness it had blocked down into the center, where it met with and then strengthened the shield of darkness protecting the Kings. But they couldn't catch it all, the darkness splashed off the ground, buildings and even combatants all around the city then rapidly evaporated into a black mist that raced to envelop the army. Many of the spectre mages tried to defend against it, but there was too much of it and everyone was engulfed.
No damage received from darkness element (Immunity)
Status effect received: Absolute Dark Affliction (level 10— max)
You have entered an area filled with Dark Affliction.
Although this spell was cast by your enemy, your power as a Dark Archmage resonates with the spell. Instead of receiving the intended debuff, you will receive the same buff as your enemies.
» -50% magic damage received (except light element)
» +200% light damage received
» +100% damage to your darkness element skills
» +10% darkness damage added to your attacks
As I read it, I found that I rather liked receiving this status effect.
Yes, it tripled the damage from the light element, but since it halved the damage from the other nine elements, it was an excellent trade.
Against the drow it was even better; almost none of them used light magic!
I looked at my darksteel longsword and chuckled when I realized I had been using the same weapon since my first visit to Ter'nodril. Now, however, it had an oily black sheen, so I checked its description.
Low Quality Darksteel Shortsword
» 50 (+84 [Strength]) physical damage
Dark Affliction:
» 13 darkness damage
That was nice, the damage Dark Affliction added was calculated after applying my strength bonus. It wasn't a lot in absolute terms, but since it ignored defense, it was a significant boost.
It would be an even bigger boon to the drow, considering they had the buff while their opponents were debuffed by Dark Affliction.
Although the extra darkness damage added to the drow's attacks meant nothing to me, their extra resistance to my firebombs was damn annoying.
I was worried about what the debuff might mean for Sam. I could see the debuff icon below her HP bar, but I had already spent too much time reading what the buff did while there was a chaotic battle raging around us.
She dodged an attack, used her triple strike ability, then twisted to the side to avoid an incoming spell.
The battle intensified and it became clear that the Dark Affliction had shifted the balance of power in this battle. Before, they had been evenly matched, but now, the drow had the upper hand.
A Blackguard nearby was being attacked by three specter tanks and some mages. I took the opportunity to flank him, running him through with my sword, getting the kill. I wrenched my sword out of the drow's corpse, parried an attack from another Blackguard with my shield, and was blasted to
the right by an explosion I didn't see coming. I collided with someone, but didn't have time to see who it was and I had to immediately dive to the side to avoid a lunge from a Blackguard with a spear.
The specter mages were mostly focusing on dispelling the Dark Affliction. Pillars of light appeared across the battlefield pushing back the dark fog with their auras, negating the Dark Affliction status effect. These became islands of relative safety on the battlefield.
Since the beginning of the battle, and especially since the Devourer's spell, the lines had been chaotic, but these islands of light became great rallying points for the specters, and in turn, targets for the drow.
I fought wildly, defending myself and the nearby Sam, and she returned the favor. My shield was the sole reason I was still alive, dodging attacks was nigh impossible; not only was the battlefield too crowded, my twenty-nine points to agility were almost laughable compared the agility-focused Blackguards.
Pain flooded my mind as attack after attack ignored my armor and sliced into my flesh. My HP was rapidly decreasing and my stamina wasn't faring much better.
If things continued like this, I would be just another tally mark when someone counted up the casualties of the battlefield.
This time, the black liquid solidified into huge spikes twenty meters long and three meters wide. The Mage Kings used their magic protectively, creating a dome shield which resembled a soap bubble in the way it scintillated with rainbow light, but it only managed to stop around half the spikes. The other half pierced the shield and came crashing down.
The pillars of light were the main targets, but hundreds of spikes struck random locations all over the battlefield. The dark spikes sunk into the ground before they exploded, destroying the pillars and dealing massive damage to the specters nearby.
Given my luck, one spike hit me directly.
It was far too fast for me to do anything. The moment it touched my head, though, it crumpled before evaporating into nothingness, like a shard of ice hitting a block of hot steel.
I was immune against the darkness element, after all.
Looking around, it was clear that the specters had lost the fight. The dark spikes had devastated the specter army, now less than half of them remained.
I was about to tell her to go with plan B and take me prisoner when the specters pulled out their own trump card.
A lich appeared floating above the middle of the specter army. Dark gray and pulsating light gray morbs — death and life magic — floated above the lich's head, twenty in total.
I knew that, but seeing it happen right in front of me was... Annoying as hell! I had a job to do and the longer this battle lasted, the more likely my death became! I just wanted one side, either side, to end this quickly so I could move on to the next step.
While I raged silently, the lich spoke. "Rise, children," it whispered, though I heard it plainly over the din of battle from fifteen meters away.
The morbs merged together and struck the ground, sending out a gray shockwave which swept across the battlefield, passing through everyone without any apparent effect.
The corpses however, began to rise. After ten minutes of battle involving combatants with the prowess of demigods, as well as a deity slinging spells in addition to the thousands of mages, there were a lot of bodies. Now all of them, drow, beasts, even the specters whose ectoplasmic body hadn't yet evaporated, were drawn up from the ground in unison, as if all controlled by the same invisible puppeteer. Grey light shone in their eyes and their injuries rapidly disappeared; they faced the drow and charged.
There had been other necromancers here and there, but all their combined efforts didn't even amount to a drop in the bucket when compared to this mass revival.
The reinvigorated dead fought as effectively as they had when alive, thus their entrance into the fray once again shifted the tide of battle. Counting them, there were now more combatants on the specter's side than when the fight began, while the drow had suffered significant losses.
The Dark Affliction was still active, but the resurrected army waded into combat without concern for their safety and occupied most of the drow's attention which gave us a much-needed respite.
I healed Sam and myself while dozens of specters were doing the same around us.
The black shield defending the Kings from the High Assassin was still holding him at bay, but it was now riddled with millions of cracks, I was sure that it wouldn't last more than a few more minutes.
That prediction proved accurate, when five minutes later the shield shattered.
The moment it happened, the Devourer contracted to about half its usual size but it didn't just unleash another divine level darkness AoE, it instead... Exploded.
It was like a circular tidal wave crashing down from the sky, the scope and power of the attack was so massive that the Mage Kings didn't even try to protect the army.
Everything seemed to be moving in slow motion as the first blobs of darkness impacted the people below. They screamed in agony as the liquid rapidly corroded both their armor and flesh, boring holes into them.
The holes weren't that deep, but when I looked at the sheer amount of liquid darkness coming at us...
Buildings fared even worse than people as the darkness shot through the black stone of every building in Ter'nodril except the Dark Temple, like water through spun sugar.
I saw a drop of the liquid enter a drow's eyes and the man barely screamed before fainting. As his unconscious body dropped on the floor, the darkness followed. Without thinking, I grabbed Sam and pushed her to the ground, trying to cover as much of her body with mine as possible.
The next moment, I couldn't hear anything other than the roar of the wave of darkness as it immersed the battlefield, not even the screams I was sure must be coming from every direction as both armies practically drowned in corrosive magic.
I, on the other hand, didn't even feel it when the black wave hit me.
Sam certainly did though, her HP dropped alarmingly. I tried to amass life morbs and it worked; my darkness immunity, it seemed, was much more than total darkness resistance. The dark element could do nothing to me, even when it was a huge solid spike or an incomprehensible amount of liquefied darkness. Thankfully, that immunity seemed to mean it couldn't destroy my morbs either.
I summoned and used life morbs to heal Sam for what seemed like forever, it was enough that when added to the huge amounts of healing I had already done in Edward's Castle, my Healer trait leveled up again, and even the lifeball spell leveled up. Between the two it now healed an extra fourteen HP.
Sam's flesh was continually consumed in the places I failed to cover, only to be restored by my healing. I'd heard people scream when a single drop fell on them, but she only groaned, taking it like a champ.
When it was finally over, I stood up and checked on Sam. Her clothes were reduced to rags, particularly along the sides where neither the ground nor I had protected her. It pained me to think of how good the defense or her cloak had been, but now it was nearly destroyed. At least she had survived.
Then, I checked my surroundings; Ter'nodril was gone.
The armies, the city, even the massive darksteel walls disappeared, as if they had never been there. The entire cav
e chamber was now nothing but vast expanses of deeply etched earth, empty other than the Dark Temple, which was untouched by this localized Armageddon.
Where the black sun had been, there was now only a half meter diameter black sphere. A thin wisp of dark energy trailed from the Temple's rooftop to it, feeding the sphere, which was slowly regrowing.
I knew that the black sun had been only a manifestation of the Devourer's power, but hell, I had never realized it was only an oversized morb! A preposterously overpowered morb!
It was pure darkness too, something not even the Blackguard with their immunity to divine magic could resist. For the first time, I understood how powerful a god could be; and how merciless. That was probably one of his most powerful attacks and he had used it without any concern for the drow, as soon as the shield around the Mages broke.
With that new understanding came doubt. Killing the Devourer seemed an impossible task, now that I'd been enlightened; still, I had to try. It was better to fail now than to give up on my plan and keep playing in the Underworld, anyway.
I looked around.
Besides Sam and I, there were only a few other survivors.
First, the High Assassin. He was fighting the Dark Mage King fiercely. The Mage impressed me by using a pair of massive round shields to defend himself while amassing morbs or many different elements and throwing spells at the High Assassin. They swiftly moved around each other, almost too fast for me to see the fight.
Other than them, the Fire and Water Kings, who looked like they had somehow survived a stampede of rhinos, supported the Dark King by throwing their own magic at the High Assassin.
In a three versus one fight, the dude was still holding his ground. He sliced through most of the morbs directed at him before they could activate and counterattacked with his own magic, it was impressive. For the first time in my life I understood the expression 'moving like the wind.' He was even faster, and moved more gracefully than the Kung Fu fighters in exaggerated martial arts movies.
Unbound Deathlord_Obliteration Page 47
