Ah. Ah. Maybe provoking the god into coming out of hiding hadn’t been a good idea. She’d never fought an actual god before. She couldn’t have known. Completely frozen, she stared blankly as a child-sized blob of golden, glowing matter rose in the air.

  She tightly clenched her fists. No. Not now. She harshly breathed out once. That was going to have to be enough. Her position relaxed, feet solidly grounded as the boss’s soundtrack started, coming from everywhere at once. Right as it did, the blob stopped in place, wavering lightly in the air. Deafening explosion noises were being used for the lowest bass notes. Vic flinched right as the violin played along, violent and screeching. There was barely the undertone of the Cursedblood Emperor’s music motif hidden beneath it all from time to time.

  “Well, Victorya, you already have its attention. I count on you to keep it,” Vic heard while the sound of bursting branches came out. Karah let out a panicked yelp. Vic looked back and saw the cocoon of roots warping around them both. He was firmly holding Karah by the arm. Was he teleporting away?! “Bishop, support her as best as you can. She will need to be healed.”

  “My Lord?!” the governor said. The fake god didn’t reply.

  “You’re fucking running away?” Vic spat. The fake god scoffed. Karah stared at him.

  “Keep. Its focus on you. I know how to defeat it, I just need a distraction, girl,” he said. Vic’s fists clenched. She glanced back at the blob. Why wasn’t it doing anything yet? The Cursedblood Emperor was leaving right now, and it didn’t care?

  “Vic! Wait!” Karah said through the gaps in the roots. Vic could still see her face through them. “I really meant it all! When we last spoke alone! I meant every word!” Huh? What was she speaking about? Had… Had she spaced out during that conversation?

  Vic saw exclamation points appear through the air and about to go right through the cocoon of roots.

  “You got it,” Vic said with a toothy, confident grin, fingergunning at Karah while laughing like an unhinged madman before the girl disappeared beneath them. She cast as many layers of shadow armour as she could after putting herself between the blob and the cocoon.

  Was that why he’d taken Karah with him? Did he know he’d get attacked as soon as he tried teleporting away?

  “Fuck you,” she said to no one between her teeth, staring up at the blob. Half-crouched, she refused to look behind her. She wouldn’t leave the blob out of her eyesight. She felt the currents mana warp behind her because of the displacement of matter right as a corridor of mana distended before her. The exclamation points disappeared.

  The blob attacked. From it, an incandescent laser beam with an amber glow came down. As it hit her, she didn’t understand what she was looking at. One one hand, the beam was very large, vertically. On the other, it was paper-thin, horizontally.

  The laser beam stopped exactly at her outer layer of shadow armour. Tiny purple sparkles were bursting at the zone of contact, blotches of dark ink spreading there. This… thing wasn’t behaving like a laser beam. She’d… She’d expected to need to spam other layers of shadow armour. A glance back showed her the remaining roots were going back to the ground, with a few, at the top of them, being cut vertically. Gone. They were gone. Then she saw the laser beam’s end abruptly enlarge, going from paper-thin to just as wide as it was tall. She didn’t stand frozen stupidly before that thing, she rolled the fuck away from it.

  She blinked twice as the blob wasn’t levitating where it’d previously been, in the middle of the storehouse. It was gone. Where? Where had it gone? She stared back at the unmoving laser attack, realising blandly that it had turned into a flat floating disk, and was now turning into a bulbous, wavering sphere.

  She dryly gulped down. That… was the blob. It hadn’t been a laser attack. It had been the blob.

  Exclamation points formed a line towards the governor, who was at the other end of the platform.

  “HEY! EYES ON ME! NOT HIM!” Vic yelled, throwing her rainbow beam on the blob. The exclamation points didn’t falter or deviate. The scorching plasma hit it and the continuous stream of blinding, incandescent light barely made a dent in the health points of the boss’s health bar. The dent she made, appearing randomly somewhere on the circle that the health bar was, refilled itself faster than she was damaging it.

  ...What the fuck.

  She closed the gap and another dent somewhere else appeared on the health bar but was quickly refilled. She didn’t want the remains of the plasma that covered the blob to- to hit the governor. She abruptly cut it off in order to run to try to- to stop the blob, to at least put herself between the attack and him, as her shadow armour seemed to have stopped it before. What had done her damage the very first time the blob had come out of the ground then? She didn’t have as many layers of shadow armour as before, but-

  What else could she do? Should she bait again the god by calling it weak?

  The governor let himself fall down back to the lower ground. The exclamation points disappeared.

  Another one barely had the time to appear between her and the blob that was right before her before immediately fading. A part of it shot towards her leg. Vic wondered briefly why the world was upside down before being smashed down again and again and again. She lost no hp over it.

  “Oh, the shadow armour is doing its thing,” she thought, right before being smashed through the floor. Wood splinters and dust blew out. A terrible crack echoed, and she had that terrible impression of free-falling all of a sudden. They hit the ground below.

  She was on her back, arms and back uncomfortably bent, and got an excellent view at the thin golden and shiny vertical line that was connected to the blob high above her. Small, panicked exclamation points were going on and off around the shape of that absurdly long needle. They started glitching right as she heard a weird wooshing sound notification, like the charging up of an attack.

  “Nope, nope, nope,” she spat through her teeth while running off, hearing the wooshing sound notification become higher and higher in pitch. It came to an abrupt stop. She rolled on the ground right as she was going around the corner.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  The shining needle went through her shadow armour when she went up, right above her right shoulder, piercing all layers and coming out on the other side. Fuck, she’d gotten the window of the attack wrong. Mierda mierda mierda. Still running, she blankly stared as she saw golden fractals spread out in-between the layers of shadow armour they were stuck in, struggling to carve a place for themselves. Purple sparkles intensified around where the glowing fractals formed patterns like fractured glass. Fuck shit ass. Fuck. This type of special attack could pierce her shadow armour and make it useless. She’d need to always be on the move to dodge this at all costs. She really didn’t want to imagine what that would do to her flesh if she got hit by it. Her hand raised to the exposed part of the… spear, and she tried pulling it out. It resisted, staying in place. The fractals had to be resisting the pressure of her pull. What could she do? Could the divinity-infused spells from priests help out? Where was the governor?

  [Passive shadow armour] has levelled up!

  Oh- sweet. She stopped next to a wall and crouched down. She needed to test out if the hiding mechanic worked with that god. Oh. No. Maybe not when she had one of those spears still stuck through her shadow armour. It could probably find her through the spear. Perhaps she should just deactivate a couple of layers and reform others over the remaining ones to get rid of this fucked up divine spear?

  [Shadow armour] has levelled up!

  Man, she didn’t want to let go of those quick levels up though. Would farming this a little hurt her?

  …Maybe she’d just find a priest or two and test out her previous theory first. This was a marathon, not a race, she needed to at least try to preserve a chunk of her mana reserves to avoid running out. Now, where was the governor? He had to have steeper reserves than others as he’d been the one to be promoted to that post, right? Or… maybe not? The way he’d presented himself hadn’t been conclusive on that part.

  She ran past a couple of cubicles, trying to find him. It eerily reminded her of going through supermarket aisles at Costco. She saw someone running past one of them. Oh! She ran very fast to join that person and saw his eyes widen dramatically in panic before returning back to numb and jaded.

  “Hey! Need you to try a divine spell against this!” she quickly said, pointing a finger towards it. Not that it could be easily missed.

  “My lady, what- what sort of spell?” he asked. Oh. He was panicking too.

  “Any spell that uses your god’s divinity!” she said. She crouched down for him to be able to reach her shoulder. He nodded, expression lightly changing when he saw the shifting fractals trying to expand within the pierced layers of her shadow armour. They weren’t succeeding.

  She warily looked back at the boss’s titles. They were still shifting constantly. Fuck, what was it doing? Why hadn’t it pursued her? It kind of stressed her out that it wasn’t behaving predictably. Was it going to go after someone else? Ah, shit! Was it going to use hostages? She grimaced. She needed to go back out in the open.

  The governor had his hands hovering over the spear, a light shine coming from them.

  The spear pulsated, fractals retracting brutally, even more black splotches forming around them. A hectic vibration went through it, then to what was connected to it, which included the very thin tendril that had been connected to it. The violent golden vibration travelled through it, following it to the corner of the hallway from where she had come from and disappearing from view. Holy shit it had been connected to the god. The spear had lost its golden vibrant lustre, now shining much more dimly. She firmly grabbed it and tore it out in two swift motions. The layers reformed, the previously damaged spots remaining dark. She threw the spear down. It didn’t clank to the ground. It stayed in the air, a few centimetres above the ground, shaking violently, like a buggy game item about to clip through the map.

  The titles of the god froze briefly, becoming stable, forming an incomprehensible name, and Vic immediately fully wrapped her arms and legs around the governor when exclamation points of various sizes convulsed into existence seemingly everywhere.

  Vic lightly breathed out as the commotion of the crash hit her first. Then she saw the roof above her be split in two, the walls of cubicles diagonally cut, and a thin, paper-thin golden vertical surface stop at her shadow armour, forming a thin line of dark spots across the outer layer of her shadow armour, right where the governor had been.

  The roof began crashing down as she realised this would probably have killed him.

  “Hahahaha,” Vic quickly said, “hey, saved you there, didn’t I?”

  The governor gulped down.

  “My- my lady, I can’t feel my god,” he said. Vic blinked back. What?

  “What, did he- did he actually leave?”

  She kept him in her arms and tried dodging the falling debris. Up. If she could jump upwards above the falling roof to avoid having to dance between its falling pieces- no wait no that’s how she’d gotten sniped in her fight against Alberon. Her fists tightly clenched.

  She made a ball with her body around the guy. No damage would be coming from falling debris, not with the number of layers she had of protection. They would be absorbing the shock. This was fine.

  “My- my connection is severed? Why- why would my god- cut it now?” he said, but he didn’t seem like he was talking to her.

  “I don’t know, you should definitely ask him by sending him a signed letter right now. I’m sure he’ll be receptive to constructive criticism.”

  A choked thing like a laugh escaped him. He had his hands close to his head, nearly clutching it.

  Fuck. Alberon had actually… left. Fuck. FUCK.

  No, no, he had to be coming back, right? But why would he cut his connections with his priesthood? Was he planning something that required all his power?

  The crashing debris made a terrible amount of noise. Some fell on her. It was fine. No damage to her health points again. The way she was wrapped around him ensured that the same probably was metaphorically happening to him.

  Then the thin golden line that had been against her shadow armour made a swiping motion towards the right, and the unclogged night sky appeared. The blob shone lightly there, an artificial sun wavering in the sky, dimming the light of the other stars because of its intensity. Only her close surroundings there had been turned to ruins. Okay, time to hide the guy and run around to keep distracting it. Where should she run to? She needed plenty of hiding space.

  “Okay, on count of three, run,” she whispered to the governor. If even that fucker fake god ran away and abandoned his worshippers, someone needed to deal with this. Should she try… going through the sewer? Tight spaces might be a solution? Maybe?

  “Yes, my lady,” he quietly said in a dead voice, staring up at the blob far above them.

  “HEY, you THING! Bet I can beat you in a ratrace!” she said, throwing the governor off left of her, where a wall had fallen off because of rubble but still left enough room for him to escape beneath it to the other side. She smirked as she saw the exclamation points in her general direction. Okay. Okay, it wasn’t doing the special spear attack, it probably couldn’t do it that often. This was doable. She’d jumped to the side, going the opposite direction, and froze fully when she saw the exclamation points deviate towards where the governor had gone.

  Vic slowed down. Game System? Could it slow down time- right now-

  It didn’t happen. She leapt anyway. Too many layers of shadow armour, she couldn’t go beneath that collapsed wall, she deactivated a couple, and the blob was there, on the governor, dragging him by the arm before her, rushing away and he was screaming, hand held over his shoulder, where the fabric there had been already dissolved, where the skin was unfolding like fabric, where the golden tendrils were climbing up his skin while reaching for his neck-

  “NO-”

  She wanted to yell out his name but blandly realised that she didn’t know it.

  “GUY!” she yelled, one of her shadow clawed hands reaching for the blob.

  She barely had the time to think about the exclamation point that appeared then between her and the blob.