Tier 3+ - Accidental Champion (Book 6) - Chapter 22 - Broken

Xavier gritted his teeth, the beam slamming straight into him, overwhelming Saving Grace.

He cast Bulwark again, and again, and again. But it never lasted long enough—the beam kept breaking straight through. He used Shield Wall, but the same thing happened until both spells were exhausted and the beam was slamming straight into him.

He could not use Soul Block or Saving Grace again.

There was a further protection—Xavier’s Body Cultivation skill reinforcing his body. Not to mention his armour and his Toughness attribute.

But the pain… God, the pain was more intense than anything he’d experienced. He couldn’t move, even though he desperately wished to get out of the way.

If the Spirit of Protection was right, and Xavier had no reason to doubt him, all Xavier needed to do was survive this—the Demon of the Depths would die all on its own from this attack. It was sacrificing itself so it could kill him.

This damned descent!

The Demon of the Depths was too much of a power jump to everything he’d been facing on the descents before this one.

If it proved to be too much for him…

Xavier gritted his teeth. His health dropped, and dropped, and dropped. He’d managed to get it well over 70 percent after he’d summoned the Spirit of Protection. Now it was below 50.

And it just kept on dropping.

Xavier hovered there in the air, doing his best to withstand the most powerful attack that had ever been used against him.

The Demon of the Depths was about to die. It had sacrificed itself for this—thrown away its life so that it could kill Xavier.

This spell was a sacrifice. One to a deity.

Xavier had heard of deities, though he knew very little about them. He wasn’t exactly sure how gods existed within the System. Were they Denizens who’d simply risen to a certain level of power and called themselves gods, or were they something else?

Xavier had never believed in a god, pre-integration. He still didn’t believe—not the way that many humans back on Earth did—but he often wondered what powers were out there.

Every part of Xavier was in pain. The beam of energy was ripping through his skin. Tearing his muscle. Pounding at his bones.

Your health is at 5 percent.

He tried, with all his concentration, will, everything, to speed up his health regeneration. He used every trick in the book. Body Cultivation. Meditation. He would have taken health potions, but the beam of energy was paralysing him. Even if he did pull a potion from his Storage Ring, he wouldn’t be able to get it to his mouth.

Xavier head a roar. One so loud that it made his ears ring again. But this wasn’t the same roar that he’d heard from the Demon of the Depths last time—the roar that had burst both his eardrums and made blood run down the sides of his face.

No, this roar was coming from him, ripping out of his throat with more force than he even knew he could muster.

Xavier tried to move his arms. He wasn’t completely paralysed. He had some movement.

It was just so damned hard to move.

Your health is at 4%.

It’s still dropping. Dropping faster than I can fix it.

He’d thought the damage dealt back to his enemy would have meant the Demon of the Depths would die faster, and the beam would end.

But that wasn’t what had happened. It didn’t seem as though the demon was taking any or the damage Karma Armour should have done to it.

A thought slipped through his mind.

The damage isn’t going back to the demon because it isn’t the demon who controls the beam. It’s the deity the demon is sacrificing itself too.

But that wasn’t going to help Xavier.

Your health is at 3%.

No no no! I’m not going to die here!

He’d been in worst positions than this, hadn’t he? He’d faced death so many times he was starting to become familiar with it.

He could withstand this. He just needed… A little more… Defence.

Your health is at 2%.

Xavier used all the strength that he could muster to move his arms. Inch by inch they budged. If he could move them faster, maybe he would get a health potion to his lips in time. But he couldn’t move them faster than this.

But, just maybe, it would still be fast enough for what he was trying to do.

At the same time as he moved his arms, he was shifting Lost Bone of a Dead God into something he’d never bothered using before.

A shield.

It was the largest shield that he could manage to make with the soul bound weapon. A shield that blocked his entire body from attack, one that took the full might of the beam onto it.

Your health is at 1%.

Xavier got the shield in place. The pain still lingered. It felt as though his entire body, insides and all, was on fire. But the beam… The beam was no longer on him. The soul bound weapon was holding.

And his health was ticking back up.

He felt something in the Lost Bone of a Dead God crack—the weapon was getting damaged.

Xavier had gotten this as a reward from the System—he had no idea how he would ever be able to replace it. The soul bound weapon had become so integral to his fighting style that he simply couldn’t imagine not having it…

He felt another crack in the shield.

Then the entire thing split in two. The beam slammed into his chest again, reducing his health back down a percent—but before it could do any more than that, the beam disappeared.

An eerie silence met Xavier as a kill notification popped up in his vision.

The beam had ended. The attack was done, and the Demon of the Depths was dead.

Xavier, wings flapping, hovering in the air, watched as the giant beast began to fall straight to the ground.

He was surprised to be alive.

Xavier looked at his soul bound weapon. The beam… The beam had broken it into two pieces. He held one in each hand. Staring at the sight of his broken weapon. Xavier felt more sorrow than he could remember feeling in a long time.

~

Xavier didn’t gain a level from killing the Demon of the Depths, something which made him feel thoroughly cheated.

There also wasn’t any loot—unless one counted the demon itself.

That was another thing that differentiated this place from the Tower of Champions. No loot boxes.

He missed loot boxes.

Xavier stood at the foot of the tower at the mountain’s peak. The tower was no longer locked down. He could see mist wafting out its windows and through the gaps in the doors. He knew the moment he opened those doors and stepped through he would be transported back to the stairwell in Thazamar.

At least, he was mostly sure that was what would happen.

There was a small part of him that worried that when he stepped through, the mist would transport him straight to the Thirty-Second Descent of the Hell Moon. And after what had just happened, he wasn’t sure that he was ready for that.

No… He knew for a fact he wasn’t ready for that.

Lost Bone of a Dead God had broken in two.

He still struggled to believe the weapon had broken. It had a self-repair feature. It was a soul bound weapon. Things like this didn’t just break!

But that beam had been more powerful than anything Xavier had ever encountered before. He remembered Rhaalir telling him that it was possible for a True C Grade destroy an entire planet.

Xavier had trouble believing that—trouble imagining that—but Rhaalir wasn’t able to lie to him. That was a part of their contract.

Now, he wondered if a beam like that would have been a planet killer. If it could break through the surface of a world and tunnel straight down to its core and just…

Boom.

Xavier tried to put the soul weapon back together. Tried to infuse it with Spirit Energy. But he wasn’t able to.

The weapon was broken.

~

Xavier finally threw the doors of the tower wide and stepped into the mist.

To his great relief, the mist teleported him exactly where he’d first suspected it would. To the stairwell between the Thirty-First and the Thirty-Second Descents.

He sunk down to sit on one of the steps. The Lost Bone of a Dead God was still in the form of a shield, broken in two, with one half in each of his hands.

The soul bound weapon no longer responded to Xaiver’s will. He wasn’t able to shift the two pieces into something different. There had been a part of him that had wondered if he would be able to do that—if he could somehow turn them into two soul bound weapons and turn this into a good thing.

But that had been a foolish thought.

Still, he didn’t feel ready to give up on the weapon.

He closed his eyes as he held both pieces in his hands.

The more Xavier had fought with this weapon, the more he had been feeling the weapon’s soul. There was a personality within the weapon, but it was weak. Something that he could barely feel at first, but more and more it had been becoming more evident.

There was a subconscious connection between them—or maybe it was even deeper than subconscious. Something on a metaphysical level. He didn’t know.

But he’d created a bond with the weapon that went well beyond what he’d imagined possible before.

And now, the weapon was broken.

Dead.

As he closed his eyes and fell into a meditative state, he put all of his focus onto the two halves of the weapon, trying to feel something.

He still had options, he thought. He could use Otherworldly Communion to ask a spirit if there was a way to fix this. He couldn’t see why it wouldn’t be possible, but there were probably few with the requisite knowledge out there to do it.

He could ask his party, too. Hell, he could ask the party of C Grades that were training one descent up from him. Between them, they might have the knowledge he needed.

All might not be, as he feared, lost.

Xavier sat there for a long time. He could have used Time Alteration again. Enough time had passed. The trap was no longer in effect. His cooldowns weren’t blocked anymore.

But Xavier knew he would need that spell again soon.

As he slipped deeper and deeper into his focus, he started to feel…  Something.

Xavier’s eyes flashed open. What he felt was something he easily recognised. He’d felt thousands of these. Millions, by now.

It was a soul.

Lost Bone of a Dead God’s soul.

Xavier shut his eyes again, returning his full focus to it.

The soul was damaged, and incredibly faint. But it wasn’t dead.

It was alive.

However, he could feel the soul diminishing fast, as though it had damage-over-time effecting it. Xavier didn’t know how that might be possible, but he thought it must have something to do with how damaged the soul’s vessel was.

He had no idea what to do, and he was running out of time.

Xavier placed the weapon onto the stone step below the one he sat on, released a breath, and wondered if what he was about to try was as foolish as it seemed.

Still touching both halves of the broken soul bound weapon, Xavier cast Time Prison on it.

The spell activated. The soul’s deterioration stopped.

“I’m going to fix this,” Xavier said aloud, speaking to the weapon. Not that it could hear him, trapped in the Time Prison as it was.

He wasn’t even sure if it had been able to hear him before…

“I am going to fix this.”

Xavier cast Otherworldly Communion.