Aggro Litrpg || Progression Fantasy

The breach opened like a scream made of light.

One second, we were standing on mossy grass, wildflowers brushing our ankles, and the sky behaving itself more or less normally. Then the next, it was like the world tore sideways and spat us out into something too big, too broken, and far too interested in us.

We hit the ground hard, black glass cracking under our backs. The floor's surface was coldly slick and somehow wrong-feeling, almost like it remembered fire and was resentful of its transformation. My shoulder caught the worst of it as I failed to remember all my training about ducking and rolling. Instead, I ended up sliding half a metre before stopping, my skin stinging with whatever weird liquid coated the smooth surface. It wasn't water.

It smelled and felt… sterile. Like I was suddenly transported to a burn unit.

Above us, I could just about make out a ceiling sagging under its own weight. So much so, I guessed Health and Safety hadn't visited wherever we were recently. There were a worrying number of rusted girders, loops of cable, and more than a few flickers of strips of emergency lighting that hadn't been told the emergency was very much now.

It looked like we'd been transported to the inside of a shell built to hold something in.

Or out.

In fact, and I admit that this might have been my overactive imagination, but it felt like the whole place was humming like a cracked egg about to hatch.

SYSTEM UPDATE
[ANCHOR STABILISATION INITIATED]
PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: HOLD SHADOW CORE BACK UNTIL CONTAINMENT FIELD ESTABLISHES
TIME LIMIT: 06:00
INCURSION TYPE: [DISSONANT SHADOWENTITY – CLASS: CHOR]
REWARD TIERS BASED ON DAMAGE ABSORBED, SURVIVORS, AND CONTROL

"Okay," I said. "So the whole 'countdown' thing is new. And there being 'reward tiers,' likewise. But never let it be said I'm not open to new things."

I turned to my right as I felt something shift in the dark. Something too big, too soft, and too wet-sounding to be normal. I opened my mouth to call a warning to the rest of the group, but the roar got there first.

At which point, everything happened at once.

A simply massive Shadow creature - a Chor, apparently – began slithering down the dome above us. It moved like a centipede someone had dipped in tar and then set alight. Each leg scraped down the concrete, carving fiery lines into the walls as it descended, and where it went, the grooves bled smoke and blood. Not metaphorically. Actual black, smoky blood was bubbling up and out, like it was leaking the memory of burning.

Matey-boy had claws. And teeth. And talons. Oh, and even more teeth tucked behind the first rows of teeth like nesting dolls. And its multi-segmented eyes didn't blink as they locked on me. They spun - oh my word, did they spin - flickering like projector reels playing nightmare scenes I wasn't meant to see. A birthday. A burning house. My mum's voice shouting my name just before a door slammed.

I didn't know much at that moment, but I was certain about this. The Chor wasn't going to be allowed anywhere near the rest of my party.

The microsecond it entered Aggro Magnetism range, I triggered my aura. A thud rolled out through the breach, and the Chor's whole body jolted like I'd just slapped it in the soul. Which, to be honest, I guess I had.

[Aggro Magnetism – Lvl 5 – ACTIVE] → RAGE DEBUFF APPLIED: Target locked → Enhanced Pull successful → Nearby hostiles affected: 2

Two smaller shadow-creatures I hadn't noticed emerged from behind the Chord and shrieked and lunged down the side of the walls in a gallop. They had a sort of melty jackal shape, all legs and manic grin, and they moved quicker than anything that size had a right to shift. Especially when coming straight down. Every bound they took made their form flicker, like their bodies couldn't agree on a frame rate.

"Iris. Kenny. I need you guys to scatter to the edges of the dome. Now!" I shouted, stepping forward and spinning my morningstar in a wide, noisy and hopefully very attention-grabbing arc. Sparks jumped from the metal where it struck the black-glass ground. "Max, stay!"

For his part, Max growled, low and furious, and his hackles stood like raised armour. His eyes locked onto the jackal-things like he'd already decided they weren't real enough to be scary, but certainly just about annoying enough to fight.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

They hit the ground a little distance away from me and started to charge, but I didn't need to wait for them to get too close. They were a decent distance ahead of the approaching Chor, and were fortunately lolloping straight for me. I gritted my teeth, picked my moment, and gave the lead one a full-speed, no-safety Crash Tackle straight to the face.

The impact as I launched myself into it felt like slamming into a sack of broken radios. I heard something snap – maybe ribs, maybe bones, possibly cartilage, or some dark version of those things - and the creature crumpled inward with a wet snarl, its body folding like paper in fire.

My right knees twisted as we fell and flared with pain, but I rolled upright.

One down. One to go. Probably.

[Crash Tackle – Lvl 4 – SUCCESSFUL] → Stun duration: 5s → Topple status: CONFIRMED → Threat generated: +15 → Momentum Break triggered: +10% Movement Speed (3s)

I pushed up off the creature's splattered body on the rebound and used my bonus movement speed to body-check the second jackal away from Kenny, who was mid-incantation with his rosary beads glowing like fireflies. Max joined me in the attack and slammed into the still-standing jackal's flank, his vest crackling with static as he barked and snarled.

I glanced behind me to make sure we weren't about to get creatively murdered and caught sight of Iris halfway through assembling what looked suspiciously like a craft table from hell. She was surrounded by silver rods, a pot of ink, and was wearing the expression of someone preparing an improvised nuclear bomb.

As she worked, the air cooled in a bone-deep, sinus-aching way around us. Whatever it was she was cooking, it wasn't going to be subtle. That was fine. I could work with loud.

Overhead, the Chor screeched as I caught the second jackal-thing full-on with my morningstar. It didn't so much die apart as detonate into wet slivers and angry steam.

Max didn't hesitate to return to the first one, which was still toppled and stunned, his jaws clamping around its throat, and wrenching something loose with a victorious growl.

"Who's a good boy?" I said, just as the centipede-thing dropped upon me like a guillotine.

I hit the floor hard and rolled clear of its crushing weight, flaring Zone of Authority as I went. The spell crackled out in a tight, bright circle, and I heard the Chor scream in anger.

[Zone of Authority – Lvl 2 – ACTIVE] → Enemies inside suffer -12% Speed, -15% Defence → You gain +12% Damage Mitigation → Allies inside zone gain +5% Defence and Status Resistance → Duration: 12s

It swiped at me as I stood back up, claws tearing through my armour, which was a pretty unwelcome surprise. My health bar juddered and dipped, which made me grateful for all that damage mitigation, but then started to stabilise. And once Kenny's fireflies zipped in like tiny medics with no bedside manner, I felt things starting to improve.

This was the point of a fight where my buffs started stacking, and my build really came into its own. It's funny, but as someone who used to thrive on getting a fight done and dusted as fast as possible, I was beginning to enjoy a more dragged-out throwdown. There was a nicely familiar, rising tempo of numbers slotting into place around me. Lineholder's Instinct. Unwelcome Mat. The base mitigation from Closed Circle. The iron-blooded certainty of my subclass. It turned out that the more punishment I took, the very much harder I was to kill.

The Chor didn't seem to care too much about that right now, though, and it came at me again, moving impossibly quickly for something of its size. Its pincers blurred, joints bending in too many directions for me to track at once, teeth gnashing, and eyes flickering with old memories I didn't want. I stopped dodging and let it hit me. Absorbed the pain, let the System spread the force, and redirected what else I could.

Then, the blow having bought me a bit of space, I stepped straight into its reach and swung the morningstar like a polite correction to the jaw. My strike caught the Chor just beneath the mess where its face should've been. There was a noise of splintering chitin, and a light show of black blood poured down over me. The thing staggered but didn't go down.

Fair play to it, I reckoned that hit should have decapitated it.

"Three more minutes!" Iris shouted from somewhere behind me, still working away on her insane craft table. "Keep it busy for three more minutes and I'll be able to close the breach!"

"What do you think I'm trying to do?" I bellowed, barely audible over the shrieking meat blender the Chor had become.

"I have absolutely no idea, lovely," she called back. "I'm a little busy casting a spell to save the world."

Which was a decent point.

But by then I was far too busy for any more snark as Kenny pointed to a cluster of shadow-fog which had just congealed to our right and more of those jackal things began forming. The Chor had backed off slightly, so I locked eyes with the biggest of the new arrivals and started swinging my morningstar over my head.

Max turned to face the jackals, growling deeply, but I still wasn't sure how much I could expect from him in a pinch. So I flicked a Tactical Provocation into that cloud, which caused the biggest of the forming creatures to immediately charge straight for me.

Or, at least, it tried to. Apparently [Disorientation] was a deal.

As it ran towards me, it slipped on the slick floor and skidded over onto its back. Kenny fired off a lightburst that hit it right where it lived, and it immediately exploded.

It felt like a moment to cheer, but more of them were coming out of the fog, though, yipping and laughing as they sped forward.

Iris continued to chant something that ended in Latin, and Max formed up on my left, directly in front of her. I kept spinning my morningstar, dropped my centre of gravity, and braced for what was coming.

"Line holds here, guys!"