Chapter 180: First Blood.
Damien, accompanied by hundreds of his undead, ran along the body of the Storm Blizzard God, but they had been running for so long that Damien was starting to wonder what this behemoth truly was.
Even from where he stood, he couldn’t see the end of its enormous body through the darkness and raging snow. It felt less like they were running across a creature and more like they had somehow ended up on a moving landscape.
He pulled out his one-handed axe and hacked at its body, but only sparks flew from the impact.
“What da, its skin is practically impenetrable.”
Damien stared at the mark his axe had failed to leave behind before looking down at the weapon in his hand. He knew full well that if his axe couldn’t deal damage, then his bow and arrows might as well just be a kiss from a feline. There was little point wasting ammunition on a target that could shrug off his strongest physical attacks without even noticing.
The undead priest manifested next to Damien with the ritual staff in hand. Damien never truly understood the mystery behind the ritual staff. It was clearly as powerful as the Vestiges, but for some reason, the Emissary simply refused to declare it as one. Even more mysterious, the undead priest could take the staff into his soul while Damien himself couldn’t. Whatever made the staff different from the other artifacts remained completely unknown to him.
“Hand it over.”
The undead priest handed it over obediently, which prompted Damien to glare darkly at the manifesting undead Lich next to him. The Lich simply remained there, waiting for its next command, its purple runes glowing faintly through the darkness.
“Cast the Storm water spell again, and this time, don’t hold back.”
Damien threw the Tome of Avarice at the Lich and went ahead of them. The Lich caught the book and immediately began casting the spell as another layer of storm clouds gathered overhead. The clouds struggled to form properly beneath the overwhelming blizzard surrounding them, but the Lich continued anyway.
The Lich’s storm clouds were being suppressed by the blizzard storm to the point that the water droplets began falling as frozen flakes before they could even reach the ground.
Damien wrinkled his nose and sneezed. “God, I’m starting to get fed up with this dastardly weather.”
He continued forward, going around banging random places with his ritual staff as he searched for anything that felt different beneath the weapon’s impact. Most of the god’s body seemed completely armored, each strike producing little more than sparks and frustration.
Eventually, the staff struck a spot that wasn’t armored.
“Don’t mind if I do.” Damien grunted as if he was hard at work.
He lifted the ritual staff and brought it down with all the force he could muster. The staff’s runes lit up brilliantly, glowing through the darkness to the point that everyone nearby could see him from their positions.
The staff actually managed to pierce through the god’s hide, although it did not go deep. Damien waited for the reaction he had been expecting, but the Storm Blizzard God didn’t even react to it. There was no roar of pain, no sudden movement, nothing to suggest that the attack had even registered.
Damien stared at the staff embedded in its hide, then clicked his tongue.
“Tsk, if only Andrea’s sword Vestige was still around, you definitely wouldn’t be able to keep pretending.”
While Damien was feeling helpless, the Storm Blizzard God’s tail suddenly rotated backward and came crashing down in his direction.
…
Andrea wasn’t that far away from Damien. She saw him strike the Storm Blizzard God with the ritual staff, and she also saw its enormous tail come crashing down in his direction.
But soon, the light of his ritual staff vanished completely, and darkness once more swallowed the battlefield. Andrea couldn’t see anything or anyone around her, but she never truly depended on her sight.
Her Dormant ability, Fatal Inkling, allowed her to sense the position of incoming danger. Even after the danger had passed, she could still sense the source that threatened her life, making it almost impossible for something to catch her completely off guard.
That was how she knew to somersault out of the way as the Storm Blizzard God’s claws struck the place where she had been standing.
Andrea realized that she wasn’t making much progress running along its back, so she took advantage of the attack and jumped onto its claw instead. She immediately steadied herself against the violent movement beneath her.
The Storm Blizzard God lifted its paw with such force that Andrea found herself launched high into the air. Frozen water droplets shattered against her skin as she rose through the storm and reached the edges of the dark clouds. For a brief instant, she was suspended above the battlefield, surrounded by nothing but darkness, snow, and the colossal body below.
She growled ferociously, twisted her waist, and came shooting down toward the colossal God of storms and blizzards. Her current Vestige wasn’t anywhere near as powerful as the White Sword she was known for, but it could still do the trick with enough power backing it.
Andrea descended like an unstoppable locomotive, her body accelerating as she drove herself toward the god below. The impact finally forced the colossal creature to react. Her powerful body collided with the Storm Blizzard God’s back, and its all-encompassing body staggered for the first time since the battle began.
Purple blood exploded from its back, scattering into the air like a broken fountain. Andrea had drawn first blood.
Damien crawled from below the storm blizzards tail, his miasma granted him an extra layer of perception, so he was the only one to bear witness to Andrea’s feat.
“Undead Therizon”.
Damien called out as it surfaced from space, its feathers were dishevelled but it was still in good condition.
Damien jumped onto its back and started riding towards the storm blizzard gods face, when he approached Andrea he grabbed her by the waist and tossed her onto the Therizon.
“We can’t beat it by hacking at its body, we need to find a weakness we can exploit”. Andrea said coolly.