Divine Apostasy Book 12 - Chapter 73

[Author's Note: I'm not super happy with this chapter, but I need to release it.]

Chapter 73

Ruwen didn’t need to shout “scatter” or any other directions for that matter. While young, he and his friends had spent the last few years fighting for their lives and the addition of deity level reflexes made speaking far too slow anyway. He trusted his friends to do the right thing. Well, maybe not Sift.

Sift leaped forward, his Divine-level Bamboo Viper Step skills allowing him to flow between the projectiles like they flew in slow motion. Even with the library’s suppression, his movements remained fluid and deadly. In what felt like an instant, he reached the first Sentinel and drove his fist into its knee. The strike sent cracks spider-webbing through the joint and a clap of thunder followed the impact.

The Sentinel stumbled but didn't fall. Ink poured from the books on its chest coating its hips and legs. Any damage the ink encountered disappeared, as it healed and reformed the area immediately. It swung a massive fist at Sift, who bent backward just enough to avoid the strike.

DamC! Sift yelled in Chat.

Hamma instantly raised her hands and targeted Sift with a channeled heal. Golden light surrounded Sift just as the Sentinel's other hand came around in a backhand that caught him across the chest.

The Health bar under Sift’s party portrait dipped momentarily before Hamma’s healing wiped the injuries away. Ruwen had assumed they were all too durable to take any real damage and the bars were just relics of the display. In meant they needed to take things a little more seriously.

The healing fixed the damage but Sift still flew thirty feet. Before hitting the ground, he used Soul power to accelerate and then loop around toward the Sentinel again.

These things hit like a runaway cart, Sift said, rubbing his chest. A really big cart. Made of more carts.

Echo dashed toward the second Sentinel, activating her Death Aspect as she ran. Her scythe materialized and the temperature in the chamber dropped twenty degrees. She swung the weapon and struck the second Sentinel's legs. The blade passed through the creature as if it wasn’t there. It didn’t leave a visible wound, but the creature stumbled and then shuddered. Books fell from its form, their pages blank and lifeless.

The third Sentinel turned toward Echo, but Ruwen had already acted. Using Shadow Step, he dropped through his own shadow. The Destruction Realm surrounded him, but now it felt like an old friend, even in his human form. He found the third Sentinel’s shadow and pushed himself up and out of it, reappearing directly behind the creature.

DamC? Ruwen asked as he raised his hands, summoning his Wrathful Crow Beater.

Damage check, Lylan responded. It’s his stupid solution to poor Perception and an abuse of Hamma’s healing.

The Wrathful Crow Beater materialized in Ruwen’s hands, and he spun it above his head before jamming the end into the base of the third Sentinel’s neck.

The attack, perfected by his Grandmaster-level Step training and enhanced by his Demigod strength, punched through the armored skin and shattered the creature’s head.

Black ink erupted like a geyser from the impact, and the Sentinel staggered as its head disappeared.

The library's suppression responded, increasing the pressure around Ruwen as it fought to limit his abilities. He offered token resistance, just enough to slow the library’s magic, and intently studied the mechanism of the interference with Harmony.

Everyone in the group suffered various levels of magic suppression, but it didn’t make sense that the library would customize such a thing. Ruwen guessed the variations stemmed from something that differed in each of them, and if he could figure out that mechanism, it was the first step in countering it.

The Shelf Wraith separated from the right wall and flowed toward Lylan on tentacles of shadow.

It occurred to Ruwen that his Perception hadn’t triggered Identify and even his Grandmaster Alchemy skills revealed nothing. It was as if his senses ignored the surroundings.

Ruwen’s alliance with the Library of Fragments had added Lyra to the group and as he jumped backward to avoid the Sentinel’s spraying ink, he asked her for more information.

Lyra, how did you recognize the Shelf Wraith? Identify isn’t working on these things.

A previous Inklord escaped a Conclave with a small stash of books, including one that included that thing.

Rami, Ruwen said. Any guesses on the consequences of using your abilities here?

The Shelf Wraith paused forty feet from where Rami and Lyra stood. A spear made from jagged shadows arced outward from the mob. It landed with a thud amid a clump of broken tables and chairs closer to the right wall. The spear stood for a second like a pole without a flag before it rotated.

The jagged portions covering the spear separated and spun outward—each attached to the spear by a thin thread of shadow.

Lylan appeared amid the rotating black shards, moving with inhuman grace. Her enhanced reflexes and Shade skills allowed her to dodge the tendrils as she retreated.

Invisibility is no good, Lylan said in Chat, and its Perception is off the charts.

Rami turned to Lyra and whispered. “If you don’t mind sharing that book, please give me a nod and concentrate on it.”

Lyra didn’t hesitate or ask questions and nodded.

A heartbeat later, Rami pushed the relevant information from her newly acquired book, plucked from Lyra’s memories, into Chat.

Target: Lexicon Sentinel

Type: Construct (Animated)

Description: Ethereal creatures constructed from the compressed knowledge of a major library’s entire contents. They animate twelve-foot humanoid constructs of various types and are experts at weaponizing library resources for offense and defense.

Library Section: Overdue

Effect (Passive): Ink Blot – Magic infused ink with healing and regenerative properties.

Effect (Triggered): Page Storm – Launch weaponized book pages as projectiles.

Effect (Triggered): Semantic Lobotomy – Funnel stored information into the target’s mind resulting in a disorienting mental attack.

Strengths: Physical Damage, Regeneration, Adaptation

Weaknesses: Fire, Durability, Destructive Psionics

Target: Shelf Wraith

Type: Wraith

Description: A shapeshifting dimensional spirit that consumes memories directly from its victims, leaving them as empty husks.

Library Section: Reference

Effect (Passive): Unblinking Eye – Chance to detect invisible, cloaked, or stealthed enemies. Ability scales with proximity to hostile entity.

Effect (Triggered): Vampiric Voyer – Rip memories and knowledge from target’s minds.

Effect (Triggered): Hushing Stain – Projectile that on impact deploys spinning tendrils that snare and silence upon contact.

Effect (Triggered): Dimensional Possession – Attack target from a higher dimension, bypassing lower dimensional Armor Class and Safeguards.

Strengths: Perception, Mental Magic, Shapeshifting, Dimensional Manipulation

Weaknesses: Light Magic, Physical Damage, Concentrated Aura

And before you ask, Rami said to everyone, here you go.

Library Section: ranking system used to estimate the general deadliness of an entity when compared to a well-equipped twenty-man raid. In general, each increase in a mob’s rank requires an additional twenty raid participants. There are five known sections listed here in ascending order of difficulty: Overdue, Reference, Restricted, Forbidden, Burned.

Lylan, let’s swap, Ruwen said as he Blinked to the Shelf Wraith.

Ruwen knew Lylan could likely withstand the Shelf Wraith’s mental attacks and her reflexes would match the Wraith’s dimensional manipulations skills, but the combination put her in danger, and he had better counters to the Shelf Wraiths abilities.

Lylan reached the same conclusion and Blinked to Ruwen’s old location to fight the third Lexicon Sentinel.

The Shelf Wraith turned to Lylan’s new location, preparing to follow.

“Hey,” Ruwen said waving the Wrathful Crow Beater in the air.

The Shelf Wraith ignored Ruwen and moved toward Lylan.

“Rude,” Ruwen muttered.

A level one Soul had the shape of a sphere, and its power remained mostly self-contained. Every increase in level added another surface to the Soul’s shape, and keeping the power trapped became harder. Ruwen’s Soul had taken the shape of a pyramid, and he devoted a tiny part of his awareness to keeping the energy directed inward.

For a fraction of a second, Ruwen let that control lapse, sending a pulse of dense Soul energy directly at the Shelf Wraith.

Hissing and popping erupted from the Shelf Wraith as the Soul power dissolved its body. Three quarters of its body had disappeared before it managed to shift itself into a higher dimension.

“Let’s try again,” Ruwen said, easily following the creature as it tried to flank him. He didn’t have the skills to see the creature as it navigated through higher dimensions, but he could sense the disturbance of its passage like the wake of a boat on a calm lake. He waved. “Hi.”

Something’s approaching from the far passage, Overlord told Ruwen.

That’s unusually vague.

Well, it keeps destroying the clones before I can see it.

Then how do you know it’s coming toward us?

Because the distant Aspect Clones don’t suddenly die anymore. Only the ones between us and whatever is coming die.

The Shelf Wraith noticed Ruwen’s gaze and dropped back into the lower dimensions. It didn’t attack and instead studied him intently.

“I’d skip the mental attacks if I were you,” Ruwen said conversationally.

Sift, Echo, and Lylan each fought a Sentinel and Hamma supported all three with heals and powerful smites. The insane regeneration of the creatures made them seemingly impossible to kill, and all three looked undamaged.

Rami stood protectively in front of Lyra. The Perception Wyrm bit her lip and frowned as she struggled to keep her desire contained.

Ruwen spoke to her over their bond. The System running this library is already cheating with this suppression, so in my opinion, it’s time to unsheathe the sword. Plus, Overlord detected something else headed our way so we’re running out of time. Even if we destroy these constructs, we still need to fight the things that animate them, which the description called “concentrated knowledge.”

What if its like the Literary Aneurysm but worse.

Ruwen strode toward the Shelf Wraith, spinning the staff in his right hand.

Oh, I know it’ll be worse, Ruwen said.

Rami’s voice was a whisper in Ruwen’s mind. I almost killed you.

But you didn’t. And now we’re stronger. I’m pretty sure my head is mostly empty space now, literally, and that Aneurysm spell wouldn’t fill a single floor of the library you built in here. The only thing you should worry about is the Conclave ending before you can absorb this place.

A smile replaced Rami’s frown, and she stood up straight, her normal confidence returning.

“Time to borrow some books,” Rami said out loud.

Ruwen shivered as Rami’s Superior Telescopic Touch passed through him. Harmony revealed a blue sphere expanding outward.

The Library responded immediately, but Ruwen had expected that, and as he saturated his Wrathful Crow Beater with Soul power and attacked the Shelf Wraith, he poured Mental energy into his external Mind Domain, strengthening it, and shielding Rami from the library’s ire.

Ruwen sensed dozens of small dimensional portals opening around the chamber as the library transferred reinforcements into the chamber to stop Rami.

The Shelf Wraith didn’t meet Ruwen’s physical attack, choosing instead to send a mental spike into his mind.

The attack barely penetrated Purgatory, the transitional area between Ruwen’s outer and inner mind. The grove gathered up the energy, amplified it, and sent it back at the Shelf Wraith.

The creature wilted from the reflected damage but had already committed to the second phase of its attack. Normally the mental spike opened a gaping mental wound for the Shelf Wraith, but this time when it pounced, dropping into Ruwen’s mind from a higher dimension it didn’t find a crippled victim.

The Shelf Wraith materialized not inside Ruwen’s mind as it expected, but at the edge of Purgatory, where the mental version of Ruwen waited.

Chaotic, unstructured memories, packed with emotional density, burst outward from the Shelf Wraith, a tidal wave of thoughts ripped from the shredded minds of its victims.

Ruwen had been right. The Shelf Wraith’s attack dwarfed the Literary Aneurysm Rami had triggered in Malth’s library. He stood impassively as the tidal wave crashed into him and spread outward to fill Purgatory. He sent the reflected damage of the attack upward and away from his party.

The spell drained away, soaking into Purgatory’s soil. Ruwen stood unmoving and unphased.

“I warned you about attacking my mind,” Ruwen told the confused Shelf Wraith. “And now you have nothing left to defend yourself from the real threat.”

Ruwen strolled toward the Shelf Wraith who remained locked in place by Ruwen’s will.

“I sense your confusion and fear,” Ruwen said. “If you understood what’s awakened out there, you’d beg me for protection.”

Ruwen stopped in front of the Shelf Wraith who morphed from shape to shape desperately trying to escape Ruwen’s mental grip.

“I’m not sure how far she can reach,” Ruwen said, his tone serious. “Perhaps you’ll survive if you’re fast enough.”

Ruwen pushed the Shelf Wraith away, sending the creature back into the physical world, and into the maelstrom of Rami’s Superior Telescopic Touch. No, that ability didn’t exist anymore. The Void and the training she’d received there had changed her. Increased her power and made her far more deadly. The Shelf Wraith wouldn’t survive.

Turning around, Ruwen studied this no-mans-land between two very different places. His Purgatory had absorbed a hundred times the power of the Literary Aneurysm in a fraction of the time with no.

Rami wasn’t the only monster in this library, Ruwen thought as he departed Purgatory to rejoin his friends.