Free Tier - Accidental Champion (Book 6) - Chapter 16 - Too Damned Close

Xavier stood at the foot of the massive mountain that stretched high into the heavens of this cold, cold world. A tower loomed at one of the tallest peaks. He couldn’t help but wonder what might be up there.

He was on the Thirty-First Descent of the Hell Moon Thazamar, having been sent to an entirely different world to face these strange demonic foes.

Across from him, twenty feet away, stood a C Grade demon. A Level 370 Amalgamon with six legs, over a dozen tentacle-mouths that sprouted from its back, three eyes, and one deadly looking horn jutting from its head.

The demonic beast pawed the ground, leaving lines in the snow. It huffed from its nostrils, steam drifting into the frigid air.

Xavier shifted his soul bound weapon, Lost Bone of a Dead God, into a long spear as he watched his enemy.

He hadn’t seen this Amalgamon use any ranged spells, unlike the other ones he’d faced. He’d kept this one alive so he could use it to test his physical damage on these enemies—he needed to assess whether it was wise to stop time to fight another pack of these things, or at least to see how far away he was from managing that.

Xavier was glad about how easily he’d dispensed with the other five members of this demon’s pack, but he’d done it primarily with the use of spells—something he wouldn’t be able to manage while time was stopped and cooldowns weren’t cooling down.

The Amalgamon hurtled forward, moving incredibly fast along the snow.

Xavier felt like a matador facing a bull as it barrelled toward him. He grinned, a thrill running through him. He’d closed the different portals he’d been using—he wanted to fight the rest of the fight without them.

The demon leapt into the air at Xavier, its tentacle-mouths swinging toward him like the flails of a nine-tailed whip. Its horn glowed an intense silver as it tried to gore him in the chest.

Xavier dodged the demon’s charge, stepping to the left. But this demon was able to change direction far faster than Xavier had anticipated. He’d expected it to be slow at that, but it wasn’t—somehow, its six legs made it able to turn on a dime, and it used its tentacle-mouths to help redirect it, half of them coming down to shove on the ground as it shifted direction.

But that hadn’t stopped Xavier from being able to stick the long spear he held straight into its side as he’d stepped away. The demon released a roar of pain as an explosion of Celestial Energy detonated at the sight of the strike.

Xavier, watching closely, even as he dodged the damned thing’s tentacles and leapt into the air, his wings propelling him out of the way of his enemy, saw that his attack had done 5 percent damage to the beast.

Far more damage than he’d been expecting.

Then again, Xavier’s melee abilities were far, far stronger than they’d ever been. His skills, his attributes, his Body Cultivation spell—all of them were working toward making every single one of his physical attacks hit that much harder.

He grinned at the sight of doing that much damage with a single strike—it hadn’t even been a strike that had hit anywhere vital.

Xavier shifted the long spear into a sword as he slashed down at all the different tentacles coming his way.

Slice.

One tentacle-mouth was cut straight in half, falling uselessly to the ground where it flailed for a few moments before becoming inert.

Slice. Slice. Slice.

Xavier dodged the Amalgamon’s vicious horn as he cut one tentacle-mouth after another off the demon, each of them writhing on the ground, the blood from the beast spurting from its wounds to melt the snow.

Every time Xavier cut off one of the tentacle-mouths, he dealt a further 5 percent damage. With all the strikes he’d gotten in, the Amalgamon was now down to less than half its health—it could regenerate its health rather quickly, but not as fast as Xavier could take it.

Not only that, with less tentacle-mouths flailing about from its back, trying to strike him or get their needle-sharp teeth onto his skin, he was able to move more and more freely.

A grin slipped onto his face as he fought, feeling the thrill of the fight, feeling his Celestial Energy swirl around him. He shifted the Lost Bone of a Dead God into different weapons whenever he needed them. A sword slash here, a spear thrust there, an axe straight into the beast’s spine—that one did 15 percent damage.

He moved like the wind, his wings helping him shift his weight and turn in the air as his strikes came down at the beast one after the other.

This is easier than I thought.

Pain split his side as something got past his defences. Xavier had seen it coming—he could see damn near everything with his Farscope ability—but he hadn’t been fast enough to get out of the way.

He could have brought up Soul Block, but the whole point of fighting this final Amalgamon was so that he could see how strong he was against it and see how much damage it did to him.

He’d been struck by one of the remaining tentacle-mouths. But it wasn’t a simple one-hit strike—the tentacle-mouth’s needle-sharp teeth dug into the skin at his side and began to glow. Xavier could hear a weird sucking sound.

The description of this beast… It had said the demon was able to steal not only blood, but different energies from its foes.

Xavier could feel the energy from his very cores draining out of him. And it was draining at an incredible rate, far faster than he’d expected it to. He gritted his teeth, shifting Lost Bone of a Dead God as he held it. The blade reversed sides. He didn’t have the right angle to swing it down, so the bladed edge became serrated, and he quickly sawed through the bastard thing’s flesh.

The movement was slow. Too slow. The tentacle-mouth had been surprisingly strong, and from the moment it had him in its clutches, he’d been unable to tug away from it—he’d been locked in place.

Which had given his enemy the opportunity to lock three more of the damned tentacle-mouths onto him. Xavier hadn’t even realised it still had that many left, what with all the ones he’d cut off it.

He felt like a fool. He’d become overconfident in the fight, moving around like he owned the battlefield, like there wasn’t a thing he needed to be afraid of after he’d killed the other five demons.

Now, his energy was fading fast.

Xavier needed to make a swift decision—continue to fight unaided by his spells to see just how well he could fair against this thing or destroy it as fast as he could with anything and everything at his disposal.

Risking his death seemed like a stupid thing to do, but the thrill of the challenge called to him.

If it gets too close, I’ll use my spells.

His health was draining fast. These bastard things had a damage-over-time effect, and it seemed to accumulate—the longer the tentacle-mouths were attached to him, the more damage they did from each moment to the next.

Your health is at 75%.

Xavier cut one of them off after another, watching his health closely as he did so.

Your health is at 50%.

Goddamnit.

He wasn’t fast enough.

Xavier had cut two more of the things off, only to have another three attach to him, making four of the damned tentacle-mouths attached to his skin, sucking blood and energy from his body and his cores.

The Amalgamon… It’s able to grow back the tentacles. Like a lizard grows back its tail.

Xavier should have anticipated something like that.

The tentacle-mouths picked him up off the ground like he weighed barely anything. He struggled to get out of their grip, but he wasn’t able to. The demon positioned him right in front of its horn, which started to glow a sinister red.

Xavier no longer sensed fear wafting off his enemy.

Your health is at 25%.

Now or never.

Xavier was about to cast one of his spells when a flash of red came from the horn and hit him in the chest faster than he’d been able to react. His Body Cultivation spell tried to protect him from it, but it wasn’t strong enough to do so.

Blocks formed within him in an instant, and a notification slammed into his vision.

Xavier’s eyes widened as he read the notification.

Your spells have been disabled for 10 seconds.

His mind turned.

Xavier couldn’t use a single spell, all because he’d wanted to fight this demon on his own terms. All because his pride had gotten in the way of good sense. He’d thought that was something he’d gotten past but apparently, he’d been wrong.

But there was no time do dwell on the mistakes he’d made in this fight. He had to act. And act fast. He felt Body Cultivation deactivate. Felt Spiritual Trifecta deactivate, too, that familiar silver glow that seemed to permanently surround him when outside a time dilation field disappeared, making the space around him seem duller.

He twisted in the demon’s grip, using his wings to help orient him. The tentacle-mouth’s needle-sharp teeth dug in deeper as his health continued to drop, faster and faster.

Your health is at 10%.

The tentacle-mouths, while strong, could only hold him vaguely steady. As the beast butted its head forward to gore him in the stomach, Xavier was only just able to avoid it.

A hit like that would have killed him.

This fight is too close. Way to damned close!

Lost Bone of a Dead God shifted, turning into a long, curved, flexible blade—like nothing he’d ever wielded before. He hadn’t even thought about what he’d wanted, he’d simply willed the weapon to be what he needed it to be.

The soul bound weapon had chosen its form on its own.

More like a whip than a sword, he swept Lost Bone of a Dead God around himself, slicing off all four of the tentacle-mouths at once.

Despite them being cut in half, the needle-sharp teeth were still deeply lodged into him. They seemed to completely ignore his armour, able to cut through it with ease to reach the skin behind it.

Xavier kicked off the beast’s head as it flailed about and leapt into the air where he expanded his wings. He created a bit of distance between himself and the enemy, downing a health potion as he flew.

There were still eight second remaining until he could use his spells again. He intended to have his enemy dead before then.

The damage to its tentacle-mouths, despite the fact that it was able to regenerate its health rather fast, brought it all the way down to 20 percent.

Xavier’s health, however, was at 15 percent—even after the health potion he’d just taken.

He shifted Lost Bone of a Dead God into a bow. Though he’d practised using the bow almost as much as he’d practised using all of the other weapons he’d been transforming his soul bound weapon into, he didn’t think to use this weapon near as much as others.

When he’d been training with the different weapons on the different descents of the Hell Moon Thazamar, shifting his soul bound weapon into all the ones he could think to use, he’d wondered if he could use a bow—he didn’t have a supply of arrows, after all.

So he’d crafted the arrows.

Crafting wasn’t exactly something he was good it—it also wasn’t something he planned to seriously pursue. But as he had a strong Dismantle skill, he was able to easily gather bones from the demons he killed. He used those to create rudimentary bone arrows at first, then slowly became better and better at it.

He had thousands of them in his Storage Ring, and it didn’t take him long to create more. It had taken crafting two thousand of the things before he’d gained the skill of Fletching—not even Crafting.

The skill still wasn’t very highly ranked—he’d gotten it up to 50—but it did what he needed it to do.

Xavier nocked the arrow onto the bow’s string, pulled it back right to his ear, then loosed. He summoned another bone arrow to his hand even as the first one was only just leaving his bow, nocking it in a fraction of a second.

These arrows were nothing like the spells he could cast, but he had to admit, loosing arrows and being able to fly high above an enemy… It had its advantages.

The demon dodged the first few bone arrows until Xavier got a handle on the way it would move.

Then he lodged six arrows into the damned thing one after the other, the final arrow slamming into its eye. The damage these arrows did wasn’t high—he wasn’t able to infuse Celestial Energy into them while his Body Cultivation spell was blocked.

With four seconds still remaining until his spells could be used again, the final Amalgamon died, falling to the snow.

Xavier released a long breath as he glided down to land beside its corpse. He ran a hand through his hair and thought about the fight he’d just had.

He’d been this close to death. This close to dying because of his pride.

But once again, he’d avoided death. By a hairsbreadth, but he’d still avoided it.

A roar sounded in the distance, making him flinch—and he wasn’t usually one to startle at such noises. A near-death experience will do that to a person, he supposed, and despite all he’d been through he was still… Well, maybe not human, but certainly mortal.

He could die.

Xavier held up the bow, the haft gripped in his left hand, then he summoned one of the bone arrows from his Storage Ring. His mind turned. The idea he had for his Portal spell coming back to him, along with another idea—the bow, the arrows… He’d been underestimating their power.

It was time to change that.

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