Chapter 29: Bear Boss (pt2)

  The chimera moved like a landslide of muscle.

  Alex ducked another sweep of vines with the help of another fast [Wave Shield] snapping into place, the thorns tearing a gougeline through the tree behind him instead. His lungs burned harder, and his skin was slick with sweat, muscles already shrieking from the [Demon Asura Style]. He darted to the beast’s flank, snapped his hand down, and shouted.

  “[Earth Bind]!” It wasn’t necessary to shout his spell when he cast it. No, it was simply a signal to the others.

  The ground cracked and thick bands of aether rose to clamp down on the monster’s limbs. For a second the beast’s weight held fast against Alex's spell as the vines writhed uselessly, the beast pinned. The three of them dashed forward with fists and weapons raised.

  Then the boss bellowed and purple aether flooded its body. The aether chains of Alex’s spell cracked and shattered. The spell had held for less than a second. Alex hissed in frustration and stumbled back as the raid team was forced to retreat once again.

  “Its already created a counter for that.” Holly yelled.

  “Fine! We have other means. Hey fucker, eat this!” He thrust out his palm, the aether pattern for [Wind Lance] already finalizing. The air split and a compressed spear of pressure crashing into its armored chest. It hit with a boom, only to ripple harmlessly against the bark-hard plating. Not even a dent left behind.

  “God fucking damn it!” He pulled a deep breath into aching lungs, forcing a surge of aether energy through his veins. Heat exploded in his fists as he dashed in close, ducking under tusks, and slammed a boosted punch directly into its ribs.

  The impact rang like a hammer striking steel. The chimera staggered, its hide cracked, if just barely creating a splinter running across the armored bark. But that was all, only a scratch at best.

  And then the boss swung back with a paw the size of his torso, catching him across the shoulder. Pain danced through his body, his vision flashed white as he went tumbling through brush and dirt. He only stopped when his back slammed into a boulder which knocked the wind from his chest.

  “Alex!” Holly called out.

  She rushed to cover him, her arms flashing with a stream of Wind-aspected cuts. Her blade screamed across the beast’s hide, sparks flying as if she were striking literal stone. Shallow scratches marred its armor from her effort, but nothing more.

  Ghrukk came in to assist, charging in with his halberd as a plume of shadow skittered along its edge. He swung down with the weight of an avalanche, shadow-fire exploding on impact. The ground rocked from the force, but when the smoke cleared, the chimera was still standing. The beast showing that it was barely singed.

  The orc spat to the side. “Its hide’s too damned thick!”

  “No shit,” Alex grunted, hauling himself up from the dirt. His arm throbbed like it had been wrenched out of socket.

  The beast swept its vines wide, forcing Holly to disengage and knocking Ghrukk backward. Alex clenched his fists, fire boiling under his skin, but he knew none of their strikes were enough. With its many adaptations, none of his spells or skills were sticking.

  He gritted his teeth. “Alright. Time to stop playing nice.”

  He opened up his artificial bodygate and began pulling in the energy from the second aethergem on his bracer. Energy howled through his body violently before he funneled it through his aether channels, forcing it to following the constructed pattern. His skin lit-up in a cloak of azure-blue light, his veins bulging under the strain of his [Vita-Surge Cloak].

  The world in his vision sharpened instantly, his body feeling lighter and faster, stronger. He launched himself forward like a cannonball, fists alit with aether as he hammered at the beast’s cracked rib. The first blow dented its hide even deeper. The second split the bark-like plates wide open. By the third, the armor broke, purple blood sprayed hot across his knuckles.

  The beast screamed in rage and pain, staggering back under the assault. Alex pressed harder, pushing every ounce of boosted power into brutal, bone-breaking strikes, one after another. He jabbed, haymakered, and uppercutted in lightning fast combinations, eeking out every last second of strength he could from his spell. After a few seconds though, he had to let it go, the spell pattern dying off, and the cloak of azure energy around him washing away into hazy wisps.

  And then the backlash came.

  His skin itched like it was tearing open from the inside, his muscles burning, fibers fraying under the strain. He forced one more hit anyway, another crunch and another spray of ichor. Obby yelled in his mind to back off, to stand down, even flashing a blaring red exclamation point in his vision. He jumped backward before the final drawback of his spell hit, a rebounding of energy into his body and channels that shrieked through his nerves, leaving him gasping as pain flooded in like a tide. He swayed on his feet, heaving, blood dripping from split knuckles. Before his meridian imprint, he would have passed out after having his spell active for so long, or been left paralyzed in the dirt. Now, he managed to stay on his feet, even he was still exhausted.

  He looked over his handiwork from the spell’s boost. The chimera was badly wounded, but still not dead. And it was still learning, a few of the vines on its back had retracted, slithering into and under its skin before wrapping around its wounded side. The vines flattened like before, covering the gaping wound before fusing with the beast’s flesh, once again creating an impromptu stitching to close up the injury.

  “Shit,” he panted. His arms hung heavy at his sides. “Even that… wasn’t enough.”

  The beast’s glowing eyes burned hotter, smoke spilling from its jaws as it lowered its gaze at him in anger.

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  Holly stepped to his side, Ghrukk taking the other, both with weapons raised and eyes grim. They still had the numbers, three against one. And yet, Alex wasn’t sure if they could break it. He was nearly running on fumes, with only half the aether stores in his body remaining, and only one aether gem on his bracer. He could tell the other two were also tired, each of them stood tall, but they breathed in huge gulps, their shoulders rising and falling with every breath.

  The beast lumbered forward, its own chest heaving, blood dripping from the tiny gaps in the vine-stitches around the plating he had managed to break. He frowned, vision still swimming from the recoil of the cloak. The bare azure haze of the [Vita-Surge Cloak] still lingered faintly in the air around his body, threads of his aether drifting like embers in the surroundings. Wherever those wisps touched the beast’s vines, they withered slightly. It was the caustic properties of Alex's martial style, and his wyrm-blood creating a nearly acidic energy.

  “Yes. Yes, burn, you bastard,” Alex spat, hope igniting in his chest at the sight.

  It was a foolish, false hope. Even as he watched, the withering slowed. The vines twitched and shuddered, and instead of rotting away, they stiffened under the azure energy. Seconds later, they no longer blackened at all. Instead, the tendrils vibrated, thickening with the stolen strength, as though drinking the blue wisps of aether into themselves.

  Alex’s stomach dropped. “No. No, no, no—”

  The vines flashed, glowed faintly blue. And then, before his eyes, the crack he had carved into the beast’s ribs closed up completely, the bark-like hide regrowing anew and knitting itself together with sickening speed. No doubt it was pulling on the potent Vital-intent in the energy of his Novice-Tier spell. Alex designed the spell to use vital intent to boost his body’s physical output, but the chimera seemed to twist that into a healing effect instead.

  Holly cursed when she moved forward to attack once more, slicing across its foreleg, only for the wound to seal as quickly as it opened. “It’s healing?!”

  “It’s a damn thief,” Alex spat. Fury and dread mixed in his gut. His whole body trembled, both from the backlash of his spell and the sight of the beast before him. “It’s learning to use my spell’s aether to heal itself.”

  The beast raised its head and screeched, the sound shaking Alex’s resolve. Purple smoke poured from its mouth in thick tendrils similar to the wisps of his own spell, as if mocking him with its fascimile.

  Ghrukk huffed. “Then we bleed it faster than it can heal!” He drove forward, his halberd flashing in his hands. The blade sank deep into the beast's leg this time, only for the vines to wrap around the haft and drag the weapon free from his grasp, the dark fire aether of Ghrukk’s attack was greedily absorbed by the beast, just like it had absorbed the energy of Alex’s spell.

  “No good!” Alex shouted. “It’s absorbing everything we throw at it!”

  In his weakened state he staggered back a step, eyes flickering over the beast. For the first time in the fight, doubt gripped him like a vice. Holly and Ghrukk still threw spells at it, but their efforts were futile. Every spell, every drop of blood and every desperate eruption of aether they used was making it stronger.

  Alex’s [Aether Sight] didn’t lie. He saw the threads of energy wrapping the Chimera boss, shifting and warping. It wasn’t random movement, not to him at least.

  Each time Holly’s wind cut across its flank, the beast’s channels bent toward a silver hue, the beast’s signature mutating in a mimickery of her sharp cyclone-patterns. When Ghrukk’s fire-shadow slammed in from the other side, the threads of energy snapped taut and shifted to a blackened-red, twisting to mimic him instead. And then back again, always one or the other.

  It can’t do both... just with my against Beithin.

  The realization struck him all at once. The thing could only “wear” one aehter signature at a time, mimic one aether pattern. But it couldn’t do multiple at once, even now as Ghrukk and Holly assaulted it, the beast had to keep jumping back and forth between the two. It was like watching a man try to stand on two boats drifting apart.

  “Ooooh good catch.” Obby broke his mind’s silence. The sentient stone quickly highlighted the aether patterns further in Alex’s vision, panels appeared on either side of the beast showing transition times and elemental readouts, and how close to each of the mage’s true aether signature the beast was getting with every switch. “Its getting better and better each time. But...”

  Alex saw what Obby was trying to get at, even without the overlays. He had more than enough experience looking at his friend’s energy signatures thanks to his [Aether Sight] ability, and his attuned body made his entire being overly sensitive to energy changes and patterns. That wasn’t even touching on the deeper knowledge he had gleamed from the contents of Sylvaris’ scroll; thanks to all of that, he saw what he needed. There was always a hiccup, a gap in between each energy signature switch that the beast made when he mimicked his friend’s energy.

  His lips curled in a grin. “That’s it… That’s the crack.” He yelled out quick commands between his panting breaths, “Holly! Ghrukk! Don’t stop, keep it juggling! Force it to split!”

  He doubted they understood what he said or why, but neither questioned him. Holly was already ramping up her attack, her blade glowing with wind-aether as she launched a flurry of crescent slashes. Ghrukk bellowed a war cry, his body bleeding gouts of fire and shadow, every strike pounding into the boss’s armored hide.

  The Chimera’s purple eyes flashed and its body jerked under the combined assault. Alex watched as the wisps of energy inside and throughout its body scrambled to keep up with the two mages. First its hue was silver, then red-black, then back again, trying desperately to mirror both signatures at once. Under the rapid assault, its defense wavered.

  Alex waited for just the right moment then he acted.

  He broke into a sprint, his skin prickling with the steady burn of the [Demon Asura Style]. The boss twisted toward Holly’s flank, vines snapping out at her, and that was his moment. Alex planted his foot, the world narrowing around him in his vision, and threw himself high into the air. Time seemed to crawl as he shifted into the final stance of his martial style, every ounce of his will and rage pouring into the formation of one single strike, [Descending Demon Fist].

  He crashed down from above, fist blazing, his aether channels roaring with compressed power. The boss tried to twist its energy lattice, stuck between trying to decide who to mimic, jerking from Ghrukk’s pattern toward Holly’s and stuttering again to try mimicking Alex’s, but it was too late.

  An ethereal arm and fist had already formed behind his back. The structure was all dense muscles and tendon, the width of the arm as wide as his entire body. The limb followed him, shadowing his strike and overlapping with his own arm. Then Alex’s fist struck the back of boss’ skull with cataclysmic force.

  The blow detonated through flesh, bone, and aether alike. The monster’s purple eyes burst like painted glass panels, smoke billowing from its sockets as its skull was caved in. The ground split beneath the impact, a shockwave rolling out through the clearing. Then the massive beast toppled, vines thrashing weakly before going still, its warped energy patterns unraveling like threads being pulled on a wool sweater.

  Alex pulled his fist free of its skull with a squelch, both sweat and blood dripping into the dirt. His whole body screamed in agony from the strain of the Asura Style’s trump card, but he had done it. The boss wasn’t getting back up.

  Alex stumbled back with a savage grin tugging at his lips. “Told you, freak. You can’t beat us.”

  Then he collapsed on his back.