Chapter 125: Bond Level Up
Time stopped meaning much after that.
Wave after wave broke against him without pause, lesser undead thinning only to make room for something stronger, and Aidan cycled through the arsenal without ever settling long enough for any one weapon to define the fight.
Thunder Blitz Lord answered a cluster of spear-wielding revenants with a burst that arced between all six of them at once, Electromagnetism tracking the metal in their rusted weapons before the technique even finished forming.
Blazing Point Rifle punched clean through a trio of armored horrors that tried to flank him from a collapsed tower, and Spiral Fan Blade caught a fourth from behind, folding its guard apart in one clean, contemptuous arc.
[Noctelith Essence: 260 accumulated.]
He let it sit and build this time, filing the number away instead of spending it. Whatever else waited deeper in a city built entirely from buried hatred, more banked Essence now meant more options later.
...
A second named threat announced itself with a horn no living throat could have produced.
[Grieving Marshal of Noctelith. Peak Divine-rank.]
It rode something that had once been a horse, both rider and mount fused into a single grief-wracked shape, and the wail that came off it staggered every lesser undead nearby into stillness out of what looked disturbingly like fear.
Aidan felt the pressure of it land on him too, heavier than anything the necropolis had thrown yet.
’Let’s try something new.’
He reached for Essence directly this time, folding it together with Gravity in a combination he’d never once attempted, testing the trial’s newest law against everything else he owned.
[Conceptual Technique comprehended: Deathless Harvest.]
The technique didn’t just strike the Marshal. It anchored itself to every drifting thread of green light still hanging in the air nearby, and the moment steel found the Marshal’s fused, grieving form, every one of those threads detonated inward at once, a chain of small, violent collapses that no single strike could have matched alone.
The Marshal came apart in pieces, and this time the flood of Essence that answered nearly staggered Aidan on his own feet.
[Noctelith Essence: 1,200 accumulated.]
He grinned through the ringing in his skull. "Okay. That one’s staying in rotation."
...
The necropolis kept coming.
Towers he hadn’t even approached yet pulsed with pressure he chose not to look at too closely, patient and enormous and clearly saving itself for later, and Aidan filed the warning away without letting it slow his hands.
A group of spectral widows nearly opened his back while he was finishing a lesser wave, grief-magic curling toward his spine in silent, patient threads. He answered on pure instinct with the Knight-Captain’s own scorched armor instead of a weapon at all, memory and Essence fusing into a barrier that hadn’t existed a heartbeat earlier.
[Active effect triggered. Essence shaped: Cinderplate Ward, single-use.]
It held exactly long enough. Aidan spun through the opening it bought him and ended all three widows before the ward finished cracking apart around his shoulders.
’Everyone I kill, mine to borrow.’ He shook the last of the ward’s ash from his fingers, breathing harder now than he had in longer than he could remember. ’I could get real attached to this Trait.’
...
The exhaustion, when it finally caught up to him, didn’t arrive like Mana running dry.
It arrived like something older, a bone-deep grinding weight he hadn’t carried since long before he broke free of the Darkness of Despair, every fresh wave costing more of himself than the last no matter how carefully he rationed it.
He kept moving anyway. Kill, harvest, spend, kill again: the same rhythm that had carried him through a billion years of exactly this. Somewhere in the endless repetition, dry humor found room to sit right next to the grinding cost of it all.
’You’d think after a billion years of this,’ he thought, catching a lesser undead’s blade on his forearm and crushing the arm holding it a heartbeat later, ’I’d have gotten better at pacing myself.’
Streets he’d cleared stayed cleared behind him, at least, littered with true dead now instead of restless ones, and the necropolis’s crushing scale finally admitted a number when he paused to catch his breath against a fallen spire.
[Necropolis Progress: 10%.]
Ten percent. After everything he’d already spent, after techniques born and reused and a small mountain of true dead behind him, he’d barely scratched the surface of a city built entirely out of buried hatred.
’Right. Cool. Totally manageable.’
He allowed himself exactly one dry laugh at that before straightening up to meet the next wave already forming down the nearest street.
...
The notification arrived without warning, cutting cleanly through the grind of another engagement.
[Power Bond: sustained Will-output threshold reached for the first time. Bond growth condition satisfied.]
Aidan froze mid-swing, genuinely startled enough that a lesser undead nearly got a hit in before instinct alone finished the kill for him.
’Growth condition. So this is how bonds level up.’ Aidan understood.
Basically, the bonds feeds from his will. The more he uses his will and utilize these bonds, the more they gain existinality, thus leveling up. Because these bonds were given will from his own will. They became beings of pure power that they were, with limited sentient and personality.
So only by using them while utilizing his will, he could level them up.
*****
[Power Bond — Growth Update]
[Netheraxin Blood Hunter Knuckle Dusters | Attributes boosted by 20% — Power 24,290 → 32,760. Rank F -> Rank E]
[Spiral Fan Blade | Attributes boosted by 20% — Power 17,492 → 23,610. Rank F -> Rank E]
[Thunder Blitz Lord | Attributes boosted by 20% — Power 27,490 → 37,110. Rank F -> Rank E]
[Blazing Point Rifle | Attributes boosted by 20% — Power 34,180 → 46,140. Rank F -> Rank E]
[Duskrend Scythe | Attributes boosted by 20% — Power 58,940 → 79,570. Rank F -> Rank E]
[Total Power: 219,190.]
*****
Aidan stared at the numbers hanging in his vision, a slow grin spreading despite the blood on his knuckles and the horde already reforming down every street around him.
"Well." He rolled his shoulders, and for the first time since the necropolis swallowed him whole, the exhaustion didn’t feel quite as heavy. "Guess I know what to do with the rest of this place, then."
He needed total power of 300,000 to unlock the slot for the next bond.
If he leveled up the bonds a couple more times, he would hit the requirement.
THRRRRR!
The next wave broke.
’Let’s do this.’