System Change

The Nether Wyrm beneath Silvi disappeared back into her storage ring, and she disappeared. Derek wasn’t about to let her completely outshine him in such a fight, so he also used Silvi’s Active Void Shift and moved toward his own target.

Of course, Derek’s opponent that was chosen for him ended up being the Crystal Basilisk. Avery would deal with the griffin, and Silvi had already dealt with the wyrm. She was now on her way to the Terra Stag. It wasn’t hard to guess why she chose the stag as her next opponent. It did look like it would have the tastiest meat out of the bunch.

The Crystal Basilisk was a gigantic lizard-like beast with a body made from sparkling, razor-sharp crystals. Derek would put the beast at the highest threat level out of the bunch because of its hardened defense and what was probably a fantastic physical offense—depending on how the crystals were used.

When Derek reappeared above the Crystal Basilisk, it seemed that it was already ready for him. The quick death of the wyrm must have put the generals on high alert. As soon as he appeared, the light reflecting off the basilisk’s crystals formed into what seemed like a laser beam and blasted directly at him. Along with the laser, multiple crystals broke from it and began swirling around in the air.

Soon, the crystals stopped and directed all the light back at the ground. To Derek’s surprise, multiple Crystal Basilisks appeared where the lights hit. While attacking, the basilisk had created multiple illusion copies of itself.

Derek held his arms up in a cross pattern and directly took the blow of the laser. He had yet to receive the gauntlet part of his armor, so he took the full brunt of the damage on his naked forearms. It was… hot. The laser burned into his arms, and his skin darkened and steam flowed off, but other than some light second-degree burns that would heal as soon as the beam moved, it didn’t do much.

With his arms still crossed, he focused on Harbinger, and the glaive appeared—grasped in his right hand. The three other copies of the basilisk begin firing their own lasers at Derek at that time. At first he was surprised that they were able to attack, but then he realized that even illusions could reflect and concentrate sunlight.

Unfortunately for the basilisk, he had begun pumping void energy into Harbinger as soon as he summoned it. When around a third of the maximum amount of energy he could channel into it was channeled, he kicked off the void with Void Steps.

He changed his directions multiple times on his way down, avoid the beams of light, which were quite sluggish and couldn’t keep up with a target moving at his speed, even if he wasn’t the fastest person. With Harbinger gripped in both hands and a giant, near transparent image of the blade overlapping it, he swung down on the lizard’s golf cart sized head and activated Multi-Strike just before the blade hit.

The end of his blade landed directly on one of the crystals covering the basilisk’s forehead. When the blade hit, it bit into the crystal a small amount, then, the force of the Multi-Strike hit behind it, and the crystal protecting the basilisk’s head spider-webbed then shattered. Of course, that wasn’t the true damage of Derek’s strike.

The overlapping image of the projected void energy had continued on into the beast’s head instead of stopping along with the weapon itself. It was Derek’s first real time using everything in a setting where he could actually see things happen before his eyes. He didn’t count the giant whale because of its massive size and the odd way he had to use Harbinger to deal with it.

With the Crystal Basilisk, he got to see everything happen close up. As the projected blade disappeared into the skull of the beast, the basilisk went still. Next, the beast’s soccer ball-like eyes began to fill with a crimson hue. Then, the illusions of the basilisks surrounding the real one faded, causing the crystals that formed them to fall out of the air and plummet to the ground, shattering on impact after losing their magical hardness.

Finally, the bus-sized creature went limp and fell to the ground. With one of his mostly empty storage rings, Derek collected the corpse of the beast and jumped into the air with Void Steps before scanning the battlefield. In the short minutes that his fight took, the entire area had turned to chaos.

Silvi was just too tough to be stopped. She had somehow already taken out the stag, and was fighting with the Frost Warg that was leading the octopus-like creatures. To his surprise, the ice-covered wolf was holding its own quite well against his companion.

The wolf was throwing up ice shields as faster than was visible to Derek’s eyes, and ice shards chased Silvi through the air. Derek couldn’t tell if his chef bunny was having fun in the battle or getting fed up that her Void Lightning skill was being so effectively blocked. But he soon found out—she was definitely getting annoyed.

In the next instant, Silvi appeared dozens of feet in the air above the warg. Then, her little mouth opened, and a wave of heat poured out before she rained down Dragon Fire from above. In that instant, Derek actually felt bad for the Frost Warg. The creature’s entire body had been made out of ice. Now it was met with such a devastating fire attack—he could only shutter at the thought of what the beast was feeling.

Obviously, Silvi didn’t have any qualms about finishing the warg off like this. Since it was made of pure ice, there was no meat or ingredients for Silvi to harvest after the fight. Maybe the water from the ice melting would have been good to use in cooking, but Derek doubted they would find out. He could only imagine what the Dragon Fire skill would be like once it got a few more levels into it.

The waves of heat blasted off the ground and even spilled out onto the battlefield with the Vortex Drifters, swallowing them whole in the destruction of the flames. Derek and Silvi both knew at the same time that the warg was finished, because they both received the notification, which Derek proceeded to swipe away without checking.

After the notification came and went, the flames slowly retreated. Once the flames had completely disappeared, Derek looked at where the Frost Warg had been standing. All that was left was a small puddle of water that hadn’t quite been vaporized yet.

The flames had taken a lot out of his companion. In the next instant, Silvi teleported over to where Jasper and Tara were and sat still in meditation. Derek wondered exactly how much of her mana pool had been used in the attack, but felt he’d already spent too much time watching her battle, and didn’t bother checking her status.

Instead, he turned his head to the rest of the battlefield. Walter and Victor were doing quite well against the flaming bugs. Walter didn’t have much in the way of offense, but he was directing waves of water at them, which nullified their flame. Then Victor would come in and crush them with his own earth based skills.

Vanessa was hidden in the shadows somewhere and had only started acting again once Silvi’s Dragon Flame died down. Derek was glad she hadn’t gotten caught in the fire while she was fighting the octopi. Derek watched as dozens of shadows burst out of the ground and either rooted or skewered the Vortex Drifters through their middle.

Seeing that Neither Vanessa nor Walter and Victor needed any help, Derek turned his sights to Tyron and Rocky. Those two were fighting the frog-like Tide Trudgers just below him. And, if Vanessa, Walter, and Victor were doing well enough to not need any assistance, then Tyron and Rocky were doing even better. Rocky had shifted from his tiny noodle form to an even bigger noodle form than he first appeared.

He was thrashing about, flattening and squashing frog after frog—occasionally snatching one up and gobbling it down whole. Tyron, on the other hand, was much more calm in his approach. He had his hammer formed into a massive weapon, and was casually going in behind Rocky and taking care of any stragglers. The two worked like a well-oiled machine, and Tyron wasn’t even straining himself yet.

The two Adventure Guild Masters were also holding their own against the snakes. Though, Derek could see that the fight there would be the first one he was going to have to intervene in. Those snakes were… weird. Each one seemed to have the ability to slip in and out of existence.

With one strike, Shae would pierce directly into the brain of a viper, putting it down for good, but the next strike, his spear would go straight through the head and he would have to do everything he could to dodge the incoming counterattack from the snake.

Also, Cain was raining down every basic element he could, but they all seemed to work just about as well as the other, and when the snake was in what Derek wanted to call its ‘astral’ form, not even the elemental attacks could hit it.

On the bright side, the snakes didn’t seem overwhelmingly strong in their attacks—which is what was keeping the two Guild Masters in the fight. The duo had fallen into a rhythm. Shae protected the glass cannon Elementalist from any snakes that came close, and the Elementalist chose whatever skill could do the most area damage to the highest number of snakes possible.

Derek did see a couple of snakes manage to get through Shae’s attacks and bite him. In return, Shae’s movement slowed, and he had to shake himself out of a daze before continuing on. It wasn’t enough to cause major harm to them, but it did disrupt their rhythm. Derek planned on heading that way soon, but first, he wanted to see how well Avery and Lyra were doing.

They were doing… fine? The griffin was nowhere to be found, but they were struggling with the mass amount of electric felines. Avery and Lyra both had the same problem in a fight that he and Silvi had… well, Silvi and Derek used to have before she became able to emit massive amounts of flame. Derek was okay at group battles because of his Sweeping Slash, but they were still a weakness.

They were great in one-on-one situations, but neither had any real area of effect skills that worked on large groups of beasts. The reason Derek said that they were fine was because both the archer and his dragon had taken to the air and were pelting the Thunder Lynx with attacks. Each destructive arrow and each mind blast took out a single feline, but there were just a ton of them.

The duo dodged the lightning bolts shooting up from the ground at them easily enough, but they were slow in halting the charge of the beasts. The Thunder Lynx were the closest army to where Jasper and Tara were in the middle of the battlefield.

Before Derek made his decision on who to go help, Silvi appeared on his shoulder. With her back in the game, it wouldn’t matter which way he went, she could go the other. ‘I’m going to go help Avery. You go…’

‘Get some octopus for some good seafood dishes?’ she asked.

‘No, you go—well… it has been a while since I’ve had Takoyaki. Go ahead. Just watch those snakes and Shae, and if it starts looking bad, Active Void Shift over and give them some help,’ Derek replied. He couldn’t believe he was getting caught up in Silvi’s shenanigans, but after eating that dragon steak, he was all for some more delicious cooking.

‘Got it,’ Silvi said, then disappeared off his shoulder.

With that, and with all the army leaders out of commission, Derek and Silvi jumped back into the battle.