Chapter 221

◈ Chapter 221:

"You know, when I'm set on someone, I don't expect them to deliver themselves to me as I am eating breakfast. You are a very convenient monster."

Rain climbed to his feet, kicking the remains of the dining table free from his body.

The leveller watched with interest as Rain rose to his full height.

"You will also make for a rather large newborn of mine, the biggest I've had for a long time." he mused, idly chewing another piece of bacon.

Rain didn't know what the man was talking about, but more levelers attacking him at the same time was exactly what he wanted to avoid. He readied to send predation his way, either to kill, wound, or scare the leveler away as soon as possible.

…Except just as shadow was spilling from his fur, something gave him pause. He hadn't noticed at first, too distracted by the one who had spoken, but the maids were… strange. Their skin pallid and puffy. And all of them had their eyes and mouths closed, as if they were blind, yet they had no problem holding the man's breakfast steady.

…And more, there was something moving within the man's clothing, something snaking beneath his pink robes.

Instead of launching an attack Rain decided to try a different approach.

"Leave, or you will lose your life. This isn't a threat, it's just what will happen. Take what I am saying as truth."

The man tapped his chin in thought. "Okay."

Rain blinked. Okay?

"Okay?"

"Yep. I will leave," he said, standing from the chair and dropping his cutlery on the outheld plate with a clatter.

He paused.

"Oh, but in exchange you will have to do something for me."

Ah, the catch.

"If you expect me to kill another leveler for you—

"No, not that. I simply want a strand of your fur, as a souvenir. I collect body parts from every monster I come across you see. I won't fight you, not over breakfast, but only if you give me something for my time. A piece of your fur. It's nothing really."

One of the maids nodded enthusiastically and stepped forward with hand outstretched.

"This will only take a moment, my daughter here will pluck a single hair and then we will be gone, and I will not interfere in your… fight."

Rain could practically smell the lie being told to him. It reeked, filling the air with a rotten sour scent.

The problem was, he wasn't sure exactly what the lie was.

The maid would approach and then… attack him? It seemed unlikely, she was far smaller than he and hardly looked a threat, just an ordinary maid… with a puffy face and her mouth and eyes closed.

"You said you were set on me. Why wouldn't I think this is just a trick? And why would a leveler like you pass up killing a monster like me?"

Rain glanced at the hole in the wall he had left. He wasn't sure how far he had been taken by the fireballs, and Myra still wasn't in sight, but for how long?

The man tilted his head and tapped his chin in thought. "A reasonable point. You are sharp for a monster—" his robe shifted, " —yes yes Rosaline I'm not saying— You know what I mean," he sighed before refocusing on Rain. "The offer stands, and mind, my 'benefactor' will be furious that I am even talking to you. I suggest you hurry up and this limited one time breakfast only offer, you don't want to miss out, yes?" he finished brightly.

If he wasn't in so much pain Rain felt he might have laughed, the man seemed to take things so casually, as if he weren't speaking to a giant wolf monster who had crushed his dining table, but a fellow leveller he was chatting to over drinks.

Which set off even more alarm bells if that were possible. This one was dangerous.

He was about to refuse the offer when the roof collapsed.

Myra came down like an angel of fiery death, a pair of wings made of violet fire spread from her back. With her, the flames that had filled the room above crashed down over their heads setting light to everything in sight.

The maid opened her mouth and screamed as her body became a pillar of flame, turning and running back toward her master, even as the other maids physically picked him up with more strength than they looked capable of and sprinted toward the door.

Rain had no time to think on it, but just for a moment he was sure he had seen something strange in the maid's mouth behind the flames.

But with no time left he could only lift his arms as dozens more of the violet gauntleted fists that had carried him through the mansion hammered down on him from above like a blacksmith's hammer, each the size of a boulder, each brutal strike making his joints creak, beating his arms apart until he took a fist to the head, knocking him back with a grunt, only to be followed up with another, then another, his head jerking back so hard it strained his neck, each impact a meaty thud as he was battered.

Rain bounced off the wall with the last hit, his ears ringing as everything blurred. He could hear countless maids and servants screaming throughout the mansion as they burned alive, but he couldn't comprehend or understand the sound, everything was a muddle. He tried to take a step, but found himself staggering as his sense of balance was lost in a wave of nauseous dizziness. He slipped and fell flat on his back.

A pair of bare feet alighted on his chest, and he looked up to find Myra standing on him, her naked body wreathed in coiling fire as she looked down upon him with pure contempt, violet wings spread behind.

"Such a silly thing you are. Do you remember Rain, when I told you to lick my foot or we would leave you to die in the woods? It comes back around, in the end. If you lick my foot clean of all this ash now I'll even let you live— probably— and I won't even kick you in the face this time. I bet you could give a good licking with a tongue like that hmm?"

Despite the room spinning and lurching and his head pounding, Rain lifted his lip, showing an intimidating number of pointed teeth.

"Go ahead, put your leg near my mouth."

Black claws started to rise from his fur, and talons and teeth, all converging on where the elf stood on his chest.

She glanced at the things warily, before lifting away from his chest with a gentle beat of her fiery wings, floating just above, fire clad feet dangling.

"Now now, settle down, we both know you can't actually harm me, and you are annoyingly stubborn about staying alive."

She gestured and a tendril of flame darted up into the room above, snatching something from the rubble. She plucked it from the flame and held it in her fingers. It was a small glass vial with something orange within.

Through his head fog Rain vaguely recalled seeing something like it before, something they had stumbled upon in Florens' grand library, a small bottled slime monster.

A weapon, they had theorised, a tool for assassination.

He readied himself as best he could despite his spinning head, clamping his mouth shut, and closing of his nose with predation. There was absolutely no way in fuck she was feeding him that thing.

But instead of using it on him, she promptly flicked off the cap and downed it herself, drinking down the small slime monster before shuddering and letting out a shivering gasp.

"Eliza squirrelled hers away before you killed her. I drank all of them of course, and that last one tipped me over the edge."

She gestured at his body, lacerated with flames, patches of fur burned away, and the flesh blackened and cracked beneath, but still largely whole.

"I can't kill you so easily because my flames can't pierce your skin, and I lack Brax's brute strength. Oh I could burn out your lungs, but I can't pry open your jaws to do so, believe me, I tried, and I also can't pin you in place long enough for you to suffocate." She smiled in a friendly way. "So this is how I will do it."

She looked around, searching for something, then spotting what she was after she raised her hand and tendrils of flame deposited a piece of cutlery into it, a fork, the fork the strange man in the pink robe had been eating with.

She focused and in a second the metal of the fork glowed red then orange then white, becoming so hot that it hurt to look at. The metal softened then deformed, pulling inward until a single droplet of molten metal hovered above her palm, held in place by thin tendrils of flame that rose from her fingertips.

The hall was becoming increasingly hot as she spoke, the air blistering with heat haze as wood and cloth burst into flame simply from being near her.

"My theory is that past a certain temperature it won't matter how tough you are, your flesh will turn to ash and dust in a moment, desiccating as your fluids flash evaporate with explosive force. I will put this little droplet inside of you Rain, and wiggle it all about until you're falling to bits! And then I will take your little monster harem and cook them alive until I can tug their skin from their bodies like discarded underclothes, can you just imagine it?" she gasped with delight.

Rain stared at her. Despite the pressure in his head making it difficult to think, he could tell that there was something seriously wrong with this elf, something weirdly familiar, it was almost as if she—

She moved her hand to the side and the droplet fell.

Rain's eyes widened and with a lurch he swung his paw up sheathed in predation, desperate to avoid being touched by the point of light so bright it was like looking at the sun.

He slapped it away even as he rolled to the side.

A sharp momentary feeling of agony and then it was gone, he rolled onto his feet, turning to ready for another attack.

But Myra was simply watching him with amusement as the point of light rose up into the air once more, carried by strings of flickering flame.

"That was a bad idea Rain. Just to let you know."

Rain blinked then glanced down at his paw in dismay. He raised it up in front of his face.

There was a fucking hole in his paw!

A two inch wide cylinder had been bored all the way through and out the other side, steam billowing from each end as the ash that was his flesh around each entrance fell to the floor. The heat had been so great that he couldn't even feel the wound, the nerve endings had simply been burned away.

Not good.

A sense of anxiety seeped into his mind. Brax had been far more powerful as a leveler than he could have ever expected, and now Myra too? What was this!?

Had he come here just for a repeat of Brax's social gathering, to be publicly dismantled by a leveler far beyond him!?

He could run, with his tail between his legs again.

No.

He didn't have to think it to know that he would be ensuring Opal and Lyra's deaths at his own claws and teeth if he did such a thing.

He was backed into a corner. Either give up and die, or kill the elf.

Flames sheeted up the walls, licking across the ceiling as the air shimmered with heat haze and it became difficult to breathe, the stone walls glowed cherry red with heat, and magma slowly oozed down from the room above like molasses.

The point of light drifted through this as Myra floated through her realm of fire, the elf becoming hidden from view in the flames that licked up in every direction, smoke laden air obscuring things further.

He lost track of her. Only the point of light visible meandering across the room. A distraction of course.

Rain's ear twitched and he whipped up and around, throwing one fist cloaked in predation like a swung anvil.

Myra, taken by surprise, and in the middle of heating up a second drop of metal, took a moment to react. Her hand snapped up and a cone of fire blasted from her palm that filled half the room.

Unfortunately for her, while the predation was disintegrated, it wasn't enough to slow or stop the sheer momentum of the fist behind it. Even as the fur was incinerated from the surface, and skin below blackened and cracked, it smashed through the cone of fire, tore through her hand and arm now made of living flame, and then directly into the still completely flesh and blood face behind.

That was the other thing Rain had noticed. Myra was clearly new to her Skills and power. And levelers new to Skills and power were prone to making mistakes.

With a grizzly crunch fist met flesh and the elf's nose broke against a fist larger than her head. She was sent whipping end over end through the air like a ragdoll, rocketing back across the room to smash through the burning wall and into the adjacent room before rolling up against the far wall in a heap.

She slumped, clutching at her face as blood poured down over her mouth and chin. She gently touched at her very broken nose now snapped to one side, at first as if not quite believing what she was feeling, and then in increasing anger and dismay at what she found.

"I'll fucking kill you!" she screamed, her voice a howl of outrage as she thrust her bloodied hands back and launched herself at Rain, two cones of fire blasting from her palms and propelling her forward, wings outstretched.

A predation tiger erupted from Rain's fur, coming out mid-leap directly in Myra's path. But she was not to be stopped. A column of fire boiled up from the ground tearing the tiger apart before Myra herself parted the flames, still hurtling at full speed, and tackled Rain full-on in the midriff.

Shocked that someone so much smaller than he was attempting to tackle him, Rain could only watch in detached disbelief as he was lifted off his feet and carried him along for the ride. Huge cones of fire continually roared from the soles of Myra's feet even as she held him with both arms, taking him up and through the wall, stone showering down around them as they broke into the next room, a sea of fire end to end, smashing through the double doors and into the next and down a burning hallway, an out of control comet shooting through the mansion like a bolt out of a ballista.

The entire mansion was ablaze, everything was in flames, including Rain.

It was a nightmare to his eyes, but that didn't stop the berserk elf, and they burst from the mansion, shot across the ornamental garden, igniting it in a sea of fire, and crashed into the outer wall of the estate with an earth-shattering boom.

The enchantments scrawled across the wall flashed, and everything went white.