Unbound

Vessels tore at the Legion, but the enemy was diminished by Felix's insane Skill. Despite their numbers, the godslaves and Vessels were alone. They were not. The Unbound fought together, many of them using their intensely powerful weapons in newfound ways. Their Skills, already mighty, spilled forth with new strength, amplified and changed by the fiend's presence.

Much like the Legion, who glowed with strange eyes in dark scales, the fact that her brother was simply there, fighting at their side, was enough to push them all to be better. Gabby squashed her curiosity. She didn't know how that could be so, but there would be time for questions later. Now it was time to kill.

The Crescian Bronze hilt of her new weapon thrummed its enchantments, sending bright sigaldry arcing across the backs of her hands. The weapon was strange and amazing, amplifying and intensifying the light Mana she poured through it, even as it eased the transition between forms.

With barely a nudge of Intent, her Brightblade shifted between axe, sword, mace, and polearm, each change as strong as the next. She flipped through them with every strike, her weapons altering to suit the foe. A thin blade for one of the swift, bloody godslaves, and a heavy hammer for the force Mana-clad hulks that lumbered up against the wall. Each enemy required a different approach, but all of them fell before her Strength.

"Kill the Titan!" The godslaves devoured her with their maddened gazes. More arrived, spawning from the very earth like demented crops, but no matter their number, she slayed them all.

“Heliacal Blaze!”

Golden flames eradicated everything around her for twenty feet, cracking the very earth as it dried beneath its immense heat. Beyond its range, godslaves shook with rage and clear terror, unwilling to draw closer.

Until the tromping steps of a Superior Elemental split through the crowd.

Gabby sighed. “Dammit.”

It was made of wood and vine and slick mud, pieces of its body swirling beneath an Elemental cascade that swelled and burst around its torso. The creature was huge, bigger than any other Elemental she'd fought, save Volantris. It stared her down, easily taller than the fortress walls, and sigaldry flared across its shoulders, chest, and legs, evidence of its slave array. A few of the Dwarves must have survived—who else was giving them orders?

It lifted its arms, and vines burst forward. Not to root them in place, but as terrible whips.

Gabby shouted, her light reforming into a wide shield, but the whips raked across more than just her position. They smashed into the battlements and the chitin walls cracked as Legionnaires were hurled back. They crashed below, but Gabby couldn't worry about them.

“Brightblade Crescendo!”

Her bronze hilt flared as she tossed it aside, catching it with her spectral hand. It was tiny in its massive grip, but the blade that emerged from it was not—it blazed, ten feet across and six times that in length. Golden Mana flowed from her in a river, a torrent that fed the blade even as it swung forward.

Godslaves evaporated before its swing; blood, force, and rot turned to desiccated smears on the battlefield—then it met the Elemental. Mud hissed, baking into hardened slabs, while earth folded over the light in waves. The Superior Elemental caught her weapon, trapping it against its chest.

Gabby pulled back, but the Brightblade was held fast.

The slaved monster slammed its hands together, and its vine whips collided, forming into something approaching a lance. With a dissonant buzz, it vanished, blurring forward in a leap and hurling her Brightblade away from itself in the same motion. Dried mud and cracked earth rained down on them, crushing the battlements as Gabby staggered to the side, desperately trying to retrieve her Crescian Bronze hilt.

She sized it in her Skill’s spectral fist and hauled back just as the Elemental’s lance dropped upon her. “Brightblade Crescendo!”

A shield of light manifested, wider and thicker than before. The rootlance crashed into the pane of solid light, screeching as its hardened tip failed to find purchase.

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Gabby twisted the hilt in her hand, her weapon changing suddenly. The shield tilted and thinned, driving the lance down into the chitin wall. It struck deep, the weight of the Elemental forcing it down through the makeshift foundations with barely a sigh.

Her hilt flared, sigaldry digging into her hands and wrists. Its enchantments were potent, but most of all, they were flexible. In a blink, the shield vanished, transforming into a thin rapier. Far thinner than what she could manage on her own, the basket-hilted blade sprang forth in a single, towering thrust.

Raking across the rootlance the Elemental had thrust at her, it burned in golden flame. The Elemental backpedaled, but it was too invested in its attack, and precious seconds passed before it could get away. Seconds that Gabby took advantage of—her rapier screamed forward, sinking with a hissing thunk into the Elemental’s chest.

Solid light sizzled as it bit through mud and root before grinding against its stony interior. Gabby leaned forward, twisting the blade until it caught against a hardened lump. Its core.

“Be free.” Her soft words belied the strength of her final thrust as the rapier cracked the core and glyph it bore. All at once, the Superior Elemental convulsed, the sigaldry across its body going dark as it dropped off the battlements and crushed the godslaves below.

Gabby stood there at the edge, staring down at its unmoving form until the notification rattled through her. “I’m sorry.”

You Have Ended 10 Superior Threats!

500 Points Earned!

Maximum Points Earned!

Total Points: 24,500!

Gabby's eyes nearly leapt from her skull. "What? How?”

Query Detected:

You Received 20,000 Points For Killing The Unique Threat: Ocalla Marzul, Half-Divine Of Shadow!

Quest Complete!

Blood And Stone!

You Have Freed The Enslaved, Vanquished Threats, And Proven Your Worth.

Very Well, Child. You Have Earned The Right To Bear Your Ancestry.

Rewards:

+Increased Authority

+Ancestry Of The Gigas

+All Stats Boosted By 300

Notice!

Due To An Excess Of Points, Your Rewards Have Changed!

Rewards Altered To Suit Your Personal Combat Style.

Distracted by her notifications, Gabby barely noticed the godslaves crowding up the wall. Plaguerats leapt for her, but they were met by a hammer of ice and steel.

“Crushwave Surge!” Beef cried, and his Mana flared outward in a wave. The rats swelled and burst, their flesh and bones pulped. “Relentless Charge!”

Beef ran through the enemy, horns goring them as his icy hammer dispatched the rest. Hallow, wrapped around him, fired off bolts of crystal until the pair of them sat within an island of calm as the enemy regrouped, its horde regrowing from the power of the gods above.

"Did you…” Beef swallowed in the momentary silence. “Did you see that? The Quest completed."

"I saw," Gabby clenched her fists.

"And did you also unlock—"

She grinned. "I did."

A Skill had formed above all of the others within her core space. While all the other Skills she bore looked like weapons forged of brilliant light, this appeared as a gleaming mountain. It rose up above her core space, larger by far than any other Skill.

Below, just outside the slowly repairing chitin walls, the godslaves had recouped their losses. They crawled from the earth, the blood itself rising up into nightmare creatures as the Twins' armored beasts closed in, their weapons leveled at the pair of them. Vessels rose up among the horde, one of rot and one of force. Their Bodies re-formed as Plaguerat and Ettin were changed by Divine might.

“I dunno about you, but I’m testing this out!” At her side, Beef and Hallow threw both their arms wide, their voices joining into one. "Core Manifestation: Exult Eternium."

Power burst from the Minotaur—uncoiling into chitinous folds and a tidal surge of necromantic Mana. It boiled among itself, magic and entropic energy joining together in convoluted patterns Gabby couldn’t parse. Pieces stretched from the walls, simple at first but growing in complexity as hands reached out to throttle the nearest godslaves.

“This—this is incredible!” Beef shouted, his body limned in blackened-green light. “The control is more than anything I’ve ever managed!”

“More than control,” Hallow said with quiet authority. “This is a song we’ve never known.”

Gabby hadn’t a clue what the crystalline creature was talking about, and she hadn’t the attention to spare. Her own core space resounded in sympathy with Beef, a faint aching echo that reverberated with the Quest notification tucked into her soul. Unbidden, words rose from within her, echoing from the golden mountain as if shouted down an ancient castle hallway.

"Core Manifestation: Wrath of the Gigas!”