Rune Seeker

Hiral’s heavy strike cleaved Fitch cleanly in two at the waist, while Seena’s twinned fiery lances obliterated the man’s legs. Yanily’s Skyfall landed a split second later to spear the Infested through the shoulder and slam him to the ground. Lightning flashed and crawled along the ground twenty feet around the new crater, and Fitch coughed up dark blood.

“We did—” Seena started, but a pair of tentacles snapped straight for Yanily.

Right appeared out of a black portal, arms braced in front of himself as he hung in the air to take the blows for the spearman. Still, the ensuing impact sent the double careening into Yanily, and both of them went rolling off to the side.

Then, like some kind of horrific spider, Fitch lifted himself off the ground, using the tentacles extending from his back like glowing legs. Blood and entrails dripped from his severed waist to the ground below, mixing with the pooling water.

“Yeah, I don’t like that,” Yanily said, finding his feet.

“What’s it going to take to kill this guy?” Seena asked, stepping up beside the others with new fireballs in her hands.

Hiral’s quick look at his Party Interface showed the group still in good shape on both health and solar energy. Left’s buffs, along with the constant healing he was providing through the Waters of Frey mixed with the rain, were a major boon. With increased access to his tattoos, the double could easily serve as a frontline fighter or a backline support healer.

“Don’t you understand what you’re doing?” Fitch screamed as the light in his pupils grew so bright his eyes began to burn. “This is the end of Fallen Reach, no matter what you do. Now that the storm is here, there’s no stopping them! Our people’s only hope is to side with them. To join! If you don’t let that happen, you’re killing everybody.”

“Just going to point out it’s you killing everyone, since you’re the one who stole the spear and let the squids in,” Yanily said.

“Stop lying to yourself,” Seena said. “You hate the Islanders for what you think they did to your sister. Always have. Everything else is just an excuse to hurt them.”

Fitch’s one hand—charred though it was—went to his face like he couldn’t believe what the party was saying. Blood and intestines hung in thick, ribbony gobs beneath him, but like all the other injuries, he completely ignored them. Above his head, his health bar was finally below half—as well as tinted green—but he didn’t give any indication he was slowing down.

“Fine! Fine! I don’t know why I even try to talk to you.” Fitch pulled his hand away to reveal his eyes now completely burned out. In their place, orbs like red-hot coals glowed and charred the skin on his nose, forehead, and cheeks. His next breath steamed in the falling rain, blackening his lips and spreading around the edges of his mouth. Across his torso and arms, the tentacles pulsed with hidden reserves of power, frying the nearby skin to smoke like overcooked meat.

How does he still have so much power left? How many forms are we going to have to fight?

“I’m done trying to convince you! I’m done going easy on you! I’m going to…”

“Shut up,” Seeyela said quietly, once again appearing out of the darkness behind him.

Her Fangs of the Lady glowed their fierce green, and then her arms snapped in like a pincer. One dagger went straight through Fitch’s right temple, bursting out the far side in a shower of green and red, while the other was buried in his neck. A twist of Seeyela’s wrist tore the wound—and Fitch’s throat—wide open, blood waterfalling down his chest.

Fitch’s mouth hung open at the brutal assault, his eyes flickering like the broken crystal system back in the Asylum before green spread in from each side. Above his head, his health bar practically disintegrated, dropping to next to nothing so fast it looked like it glitched out. His arms dropped to his sides, while the solid-solar tentacles at his back stumbled like they were drunk.

Whether it was some post-mortem twitch or the Infested still unbelievably being alive, a pair of the tentacles thrashed wildly around, forcing Seeyela to escape with a Bamf. She appeared beside the party, the helm of her armor healed thanks to Left’s work, and all eight eyes focused on Fitch.

“Sis,” Seena said, putting a hand on Seeyela’s shoulder.

They all knew Fitch had to die—he was too dangerous—but Hiral had hoped it would be anybody other than Seeyela who was forced to do the deed. Fitch was one of the last two surviving members of Seeyela’s party, and she already blamed herself for the loss of the others. There was no way she wouldn’t try to shoulder this too.

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“It had to be done,” Seeyela said simply.

That said, Fitch hadn’t fallen over yet. His limp body still staggered around on the tentacles as if they were drunk. But… a dagger through the head should do a lot more than that. Another stumble moved the Infested further to the left, and Hiral’s eyes widened in understanding.

“The squid inside him isn’t dead!” he shouted. “It’s moving closer to the tower!”

He then launched himself forward, weapon already swinging. Up, around, and down his sword crashed with fifty times its usual weight to… shatter the ground.

He’d missed—the Infested had sprung fifty feet straight up into the air in an instant. Worse, solar energy was building within it at a tremendous rate. Far more and far faster than anything it’d done before. Actually, it felt a lot like what Yanily had done with the Spear of Clouds back in the Rise of Fallen Reach.

It was sacrificing its lifeforce to power some kind of ability. But, what would it be…?

Hiral’s eyes went to the damaged crystal atop the tower. The damaged Fallen’s crystal.

“Stop it!” Hiral and Seena shouted at the same time.

Hiral snapped his arm up, the Ring of Amin Thett following, while Yanily built a charge for Chain Lightning+ and Seena poured energy into one of her terrifying flaming lances. But even in that second of preparation, the Infested’s energy levels completely eclipsed theirs. Out of time, all three threw their strongest attacks, the Annihilation of Amin Thett converging with Seena and Yanily’s attacks at the same time the Infested extended its tentacles in the direction of the tower.

Pure energy, lightning, and fire met in a tremendous explosion that created a new sun in the sky above the island. With a corona of fire, electricity crackling around the edges, the monstrosity flooded those below with a wave of heat, erasing the falling rain in a heartbeat and even pushing back the storm clouds overhead.

The intensity of it nearly seared Hiral’s eyes, but his breath caught, and he couldn’t look away as a spear of light flew from within the sun. Reality warped where the spear passed, wobbling the air and seeming to rip patches of it off. Hiral’s hand raised, solar energy moving towards any of his runes—all of them—to try and stop the bolt, but by the time he’d spotted it, it was already too late.

It hit the Fallen’s crystal with an island-shaking blast, a second “new sun” appearing in the sky from the explosion that consumed the top of the tower. This time, Hiral had no choice but to look away or be blinded, but he felt the magnitude of the explosion right down to his bones. As his head turned, he spotted a burnt and broken husk fall from within the first sun to smack to the ground below.

The Infested’s body—Fitch’s body—was barely recognizable, little more than part of a torso with one arm and half a head. Everything else had been eradicated by the combined might of their three simultaneous attacks. With the heat still at his back from the blast, Hiral let his eyes linger on Fitch, View activating but showing nothing. No name. No Rank. No health bar.

They’d done it. Fitch was dead.

Dynamic Quest: Update

One of the Infested seeks to free the Fallen trapped within the nearby crystal.

Don’t let that happen!

Infested Defeated: 1/1

Fallen Contained: 0/1?

Hiral quickly read the notification window, confirming they’d truly defeated Fitch this time, but the question mark at the end made him nervous. Finally, with the heat at his back dying down and the rain once again falling, Hiral gripped the Emperor’s Greatswordtight in his hand and spun to look at the crystal. How bad will it be? Are we going to have to deal with an S-Rank monster?

His legs almost gave out underneath him as he spotted the crystal still intact. More cracks spiderwebbed out from the two initial gouges from the Spear of Clouds, but even using its lifeforce in one final attack, the Infested hadn’t been able to finish it.

“Hira… Hiral, I can’t tell through the rain…” Seena said from beside him.

“The crystal didn’t completely break,” he answered. “We stopped it! Now we just need to get the Spear of Clouds back to the Grandfather and this’ll be over. Sure, I need to do a few things to keep the other Fallen asleep, and maybe do something to repair this crystal, but… we did it.

“We saved Fallen Reach!”

Seena moved in from the side and squeezed him in a tight hug. The flames of her phoenix sheath were barely warm to him, and she nestled her head against the side of his face. “We did. Thank you for not dying.”

“Told you I’d be fine,” he replied, lifting a hand to rub the top of her head.

“You know, guys,” Yanily started, “I hate to interrupt the moment—it’s cute and all—but if we really did stop it, why hasn’t the notification window updated?”

“The crystal isn’t broken?” Seeyela asked. “You’re sure?”

Lifting his head from where it rested against Seena’s, Hiral checked the notification and looked again at the crystal. “Cracked, definitely, but it’s still in one piece. Maybe I need to…” He trailed off as the deep ocean of dense power within the crystal stirred.

No, not stirring. Flexing.

Before he could even open his mouth again, there was a silent compression, like a powerfully beating heart, and a large chunk of the crystal broke off. Hiral watched in horrified fascination as the crystal fell the length of the tall tower and shattered into a thousand smaller pieces when it hit the ground. Lightning flashed in the clouds overhead, reflected off the sea of shards on the ground, and Hiral’s gaze snapped back up to the top.

Just in time for another heartbeat-like compression to shatter the top half of the crystal.

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