Tier 3+ - Accidental Champion (Book 6) - Chapter 5 - Runes and Monstrosities

[Author note: Sorry about the delay. I didn't realise I scheduled this at 5PM my time instead of 5AM. Caught it only 11 hours after it was supposed to go out...]

Five hulking demons loomed over Xavier.

The demons were reminiscent of the Bladed Crawlers from the first floor, only these ones were twice as large and had twenty legs. Each of those legs was bladed like the crawlers had been, but the demons had a ranged attack that the crawlers had lacked too—their bulbous body could manifest and shoot spikes toward their enemies with intense alacrity.

And they were C Grade—Level 350.

The bastard things attacked in groups of five. They were the only demons on the Thirtieth Floor, and the nastiest he’d encountered since coming to the Thazamar Hell Moon.

Xavier enjoyed facing them—their many legs proved to be the perfect challenge to his physical combat abilities. His Evasion skill had gone up a dozen ranks since stepping onto the Thirtieth Descent, and his ability to block, parry, and divert these damned things’ bladed legs had shot up tremendously as well.

Xavier swung The Lost Bone of a Dead God. It turned from a sword into a warhammer, crushing the nearest leg to him. Then Xavier shifted the weapon into a spear, making the blade appear on the opposite side that the hammer head had been on so he could thrust backward, straight into the bulbous body of one of the demonic beasts.

Energy exploded from the head of the blade, pouring into the body of his enemy.

A kill notification appeared in his vision.

Finally.

Each of Xavier’s attacks was enhanced with Body Cultivation. Every strike he landed was a small explosion of power. He could hurt these things—god, he could hurt them a lot.

But he still wasn’t fast enough.

Countless times he found himself using Soul Block, to the point where his soulkeeping reserve was only dwindling more and more the longer he was on the Thirtieth Descent.

Fortunately, he could easily reap souls from the previous descents. He knew that he would never be hungry for souls in a place like this. If he wanted to simply kill his enemies as swiftly as possible, he would resort to using Soul Strike, over and over. And maybe the time for that kind of grinding would come soon enough.

But right now, Xavier was determined to defeat just one group of these demons—which were called Monstrosities—without having to resort to using spells other than Body Cultivation.

It was proving to be an incredibly difficult goal.

Through all thirty descents that he’d cleared, Xavier knew he was letting his other skills and spells lag behind in favour of physical combat. That was something he was acutely aware of, without the need for his companions to point it out every time he cleared a descent.

Xavier was more than content to work on his other spells. He could easily backtrack through Thazamar and grind the different descents with each of his spells if he needed to—but gaining levels, gaining attributes, and making Body Cultivation as strong as possible was his main goal at present.

Three years…

He would make that time last as long as possible.

Xavier dodged under one of the Monstrosities. He slid along the stone. Though their legs were incredibly long, their bulbous bodies tended to hang low to the ground. He transformed Lost Bone of a Dead God to reinforce his arms and claws as he slashed beneath a beast’s belly—this was where they were weakest, he’d found.

But the spikes they shot from their bulbous abdomen weren’t their only defence. When their tough skin was pierced, they released acid.

The acid was something he’d been learning how to deal with since he’d started to fight these things. He was able to externalise his Celestial Energy to a limited degree, creating a sort of force field that would make the acid sluice off him—not even touching his armour.

He’d quickly found that the acid ate straight through the armour he wore, cutting deep into his skin and muscle until it deteriorated his bones if he let it.

Xavier couldn’t maintain this Celestial Energy forcefield for long, so he had to reapply it each time acid came his way. It was also something he was trialling on the spikes—his armour protected better against those, but not good enough. He still took damage every time one hit him.

The acid—which would have hit him square in the neck and the chest the way he was sliding across the floor slashing with his claws—slid straight off the forcefield as intended.

Xavier reached the other side of the Monstrosity and turned Lost Bone of a Dead God into a scythe-staff. One massive swing sent the blade straight into the centre of its abdomen. Though he’d been training with several different weapons lately, his old faithful scythe-staff was still always at his disposal.

A kill notification entered his vision.

Two down.

He hadn’t needed to use Soul Block once during this fight. A grin slid onto his face. Usually, he’d taken enough damage by now to be a little wary of these bastards. That wasn’t so this time.

Several spikes shot at him all at once. Xavier expanded his wings, reinforcing them with Body Cultivation, and whirled. The spikes had more trouble gaining purchase on a moving surface and were more easily turned away.

With only three of the bastards left, Xavier reminded himself not to get too cocky. He expanded his wings once the barrage of spikes had ended but kept them protecting his flanks as he sprinted at the third of the Monstrosities.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

Another barrage of spikes began less than a second after the first had ended. But he couldn’t just stand their twirling and diverting them. He had to keep taking action. He could handle the pain in his wings, even if each thud represented a drop in his health.

He cut deep into the third Monstrosity with his soul bound weapon in the form of a sword, then a dagger, then claws. He sliced off leg after leg of the twenty limbs the demon had. He dodged and he scrambled and he struck.

When the fight was done, Xavier breathed heavily, his chest expanding and contracting, sweat dripping from his forehead, making the inside of the helm he wore even wetter than it already was.

Each of the five Monstrosities lay dead around him in varying conditions.

Your health is at 5%.

Xavier straightened, standing to his full height. His breathing became more even. It had been a while since he’d let his health drop that far. He took a health potion from his inventory and downed it, watching his health creep back up to a more respectable number as he looted the corpses, putting each of them into his inventory.

Then he sat down on the hard stone floor and began the arduous process of pulling spikes from his wings, something that made him need to contort his body in the most strangest of positions, but also something he was too prideful to get one of his companions to do for him.

Pulling the spikes was a difficult process not only because of the positions he needed to get himself into, but for the fact that his wings healed swiftly. The hard, leathery skin had healed around the spikes, holding them in tightly. Xavier had to create new wounds just to yank the damned things out.

Despite the pain, despite how low he’d let his health get, Xavier had a satisfied grin on his face.

He’d accomplished the goal he’d set for himself. He’d defeated all five of the Monstrosities without casting a single spell other than Body Cultivation.

I think that means I’m ready.

Xavier portalled back to the stairwell at the start of the Thirtieth Descent. There were a hundred such groups of Level 350 Monstrosities on this descent, and he’d defeated every single one of them once more.

But it was only the last group of them that he’d managed to defeat without needing to cast a spell.

Now that he’d managed his goal, it was time to use Time Alteration. If he could freeze time on this entire descent and clear it with less than a second passing outside of the bubble, he would be able to gain levels at an immense rate—not to mention gain a hell of a lot more ranks in his different weapon mastery specialties.

His companions were still high above him on the Fifteenth Descent. The stairwells were sort of like safe zones. What he’d found was while the beasts in this place could come to the stairwells, they didn’t tend to. It was almost as though they couldn’t sense the Denizens when they were there—so the others were fighting close to their stairwell, retreating back to it to heal whenever they needed to.

It was all very strange. This place had existed before the System had integrated it. The description led him to believe that it had always been this way. It made him wonder why—and how—a place like this could even exist. A place with makeshift safe zones. A place where the demons automagically respawned.

How could any of that be possible without the System’s direct influence?

Xavier sat on one of the steps. The Time Alteration spell was good and ready for him to use, but that wasn’t what he did immediately. Instead, he simply sat their and let his health regenerate all the way back to its fullest as he listened to the fighting going on up the steps.

Each of his companions had a telepathic link to him, and if they got into any true danger, they would contact him immediately. He would be able to portal to them with ease, and deal with whatever threat they came upon. So he wasn’t worried about their safety.

He pulled out the book he’d been rifling through for the last few month Inscribing. It had become a little obsession of his. Though he now knew everything he could know about what was inside these pages, he found a certain comfort in simply holding the book in his hands.

Xavier shut his eyes and thought about the different runes. There was another weapon that he’d transformed the Lost Bone of a Dead God into—a stylus. Though he still felt strange calling the glorified pen a weapon.

He shifted his soul bound weapon into a stylus in that moment. He held it in his hand the way he might a normal pen.

Xavier hadn’t found much time to handwrite things before the System came. It was always more efficient typing on his laptop than it was putting anything pen to paper. Still—like any writer—he’d had a decent stack of notebooks that he’d write in whenever it struck his fancy.

Holding the stylus felt familiar and more than a little nostalgic, though he wasn’t holding it so he could handwrite.

Xavier drew one of the runes that he’d learnt in the air. It had five different lines, and he could sketch it out in a fraction of a second now.

Once he had finished drawing the final line the whole rune glowed, then a gust of cool air flowed around him in a constant stream. He grinned. That stream of air would last for roughly twenty minutes. The first time he’d used that rune, however, the air had only blown for a few seconds, and it hadn’t been a cold breeze like he’d intended.

He was getting more adept with the different runes.

As he stared at the rune still hanging there in the air, glowing softly, he tilted his head to the side. Just as he could sense the connection to the Otherworld when it was open, he could sense something in the rune.

As the handbook had said, these runes were the language underlying the very universe—at least, that was the prevailing theory.

It took a fair bit of concentration, however, for him to be able to feel that connection. He was still growing familiar with it, after all.

What he could feel was that the connection was getting stronger and stronger every time he drew a different rune. Inscribing, using runes, was supposed to be a kind of ritual. Like any ritual, it needed to draw its power from somewhere.

The rituals Xavier had been using before he had started to learn the art of inscribing all drew power from the Otherworld. The amount of power they drew relied upon how many souls, or how much Soul Energy, he sacrificed.

This, using runes, was rather different. The ritual—or, in this case the rune itself—seemed to draw its power from the very universe itself. That information wasn’t in the handbook. Either it wasn’t something Empress Larona, the true author, knew, or it wasn’t something she wished to share with those reading the book.

But Xavier didn’t need the handbook to know where the power was coming from. He could sense it.

One might think that because the power came from the very universe itself, that meant he could simply draw on as much power as he wished. But there were certain parameters that limited the amount of power he could wield. Parameters that relied upon several things—his actual Inscribing spell, which he’d gained after practising drawing the runes in the air for a whole month of elapsed time within the time dilation field while his companions trained on the different descents, his attributes, and how adept he was at actually drawing the rune itself—which seemed to be related to his rank in the Inscribing spell, but those two weren’t equally matched.

There was a certain state of mind required when drawing a rune. It felt like a powerful meditative state. He could use a portion of his mind for this meditative state, but it worked better the more of his mind was turned toward it.

Xavier focused on that connection with all his concentration. Each time he used a rune, he tried to sense it more and more. The source of the power seemed endless. It made him wonder… If he could access that power, divert it into himself somehow…

But that was a pipe dream.

Still, he felt as though it was important to better understand the connection. Knowledge was power, after all. He remained certain of that fact.

Xavier hadn’t just been learning how to make a cool breeze with the runes, he’d been learning other things, too. He’d been using his armour to test etching different defensive and offensive runes into items. He’d managed to make the armour stronger than it had been originally, but the armour had stopped accepting runes after a certain point—he would need to acquire more powerful armour if he wished to add more.

That was something he’d been speaking to Rhaalir about. The elf spirit seemed rather knowledgeable on powerful items. Apparently, at one point in his very long life, he’d run an auction house in an ancient sector. That was something that had taken Xavier by surprise. He hadn’t even known auction houses existed in the Greater Universe, though he supposed it made sense that they would. Not everything went through the System Shop, after all.

Xavier had been curious, after all he’d been doing with his soul bound weapon, and its ability to shift and transform into anything he wished, if there was perhaps an armour equivalent.

The elf had said there most certainly was.

Not only that, but he’d also told Xavier about soul bound armour. It had most certainly piqued his interest—but it wasn’t currently on his agenda.

Xavier’s forehead creased in concentration as he turned his mind to sensing the connection inside the rune. After a time, his head turned sharply. His eyes snapped open, his gaze locking onto the stone wall of the stairwell.

He could sense something there. He frowned, standing up. The cool breeze still rolled down the steps, a welcome respite from the heat of this Hell Moon—for even in the deep caverns it was blistering. Xavier walked to the wall where he could sense the anomaly.

The stone wall of the stairwell was completely sheer. Unlike the cavern at the entrance, which had countless different etchings in them, nothing of the sort could be found here. He touched a finger to the smooth stone, then ran his hand along it until it fell upon the spot he could sense. Whatever it was, he couldn’t feel it with his bare hand.

But that didn’t mean it wasn’t there.

Curious, Xavier looked down at the stylus in his hand. He shifted it into a chisel—that took a moment of concentration, for he’d never needed something like that. He put the chisel to the wall and started to scratch off a bit of the stone.

The stone was tougher than he’d anticipated. As strong as Xavier was, and as sharp as the chisel was, he figured he’d make easy work of the stone, but it took him reinforcing himself with Celestial Energy to file off the surface of the wall.

He didn’t know if something was behind it, but he wasn’t imagining the thing he sensed. The connection he felt—the exact same connection that he sensed in his runes.

A minute passed as Xavier scratched through the stone. When he’d done what he needed, he stepped back.

A rune was etched into the stairwell wall between descents.