NOVEL NEXT 88 - Beatrice Blackstone Feels Sorry For Herself And Then She Wins
"Alright Gelias, what's the call?" Beatrice said, eyeing the two Monsters. It was a standoff. They weren't moving to attack her, but she wasn't in any particular rush to get close to them.
Gelias peered down at her from atop the prison cells. "You, asking for advice?"
"You know your stuff, Gelias. And you know your place. I'm not stupid."
If it was Rory or Archmund, they would've muttered something like "could've fooled me." Gelias didn't. Beatrice appreciated that.
"The faster we kill them, the better the loot we get from them," Gelias said.
Already black blood was oozing out of the myriad arrow wounds in the Monsters' skin, scabbing and hardening into a thick carapace.
"Headshots?" Beatrice said.
Gelias drew his bow.
"The Winds Bear My Arrow!"
Her hair and cloak blew back. Gelias's arrow flew, faster than her eye could trace. And yet—
The Slingerclerk raised its arm just in time to intercept the arrow. The arrow almost pierced clean through, yet the fletching caught on the flesh.
"Go in," Gelias said.
"They're fast enough to stop your arrows! What chance do I—"
"You can take a hit," Gelias said. "I think this will be a great learning experience for you."
"You're as awful as the rest of them."
She reached into her pouch and clutched her Gem, an onyx tetrahedron, in her right hand.
Monsters followed a simple rule: kill them as fast as you could, and you'd get the most benefit. The longer they stayed "alive", the more they could regenerate, sapping their core Gems to form Gemstone Gear.
Weaker and lazier adventurers benefited from this. As they fought, they weakened the Monsters while simultaneously generating easier-to-use Gemstone Gear, and they could sell the diminished core Gems for a pretty penny.
Powerful adventurers and nobles got nothing out of this. They got nothing out of the twentieth duplicate piece of gear from the twentieth identical Monster, much preferring a denser, larger core Gem that they could Attune and Awaken for a longer term.
And once you could channel your magic and activate Skills using a larger Gem, there was little purpose to using a lesser Gem that could do the same thing. So even though adventurers and nobles could kill lesser Monsters in a single blow, before they were fully formed, there were serious diminishing returns to doing so.
Any noble child knew this. Beatrice was no exception.
That was why she'd adopted her fighting style. It took far less energy for a Monster to adapt a bit of superficial darkness than it took to overcome a bunch of tiny harassing wounds, like Gelias's techniques, and a fast and decisive offense was far more conducive to wealth and victory than Rory's stalling defense.
Archmund, until this year, hadn't even registered as a potential rival, and thinking about his meteoric rise made her want to kick the wall.
She took a breath, her magic erupting through her Gem and then enveloping her body, cloaking her in darkness. As above, so below. With her Shadow Cloak active, weaker, lower-order minds wouldn't be able to detect her at all. It wasn't a useful tactic against human opponents, yet, but it worked against instinct-driven Monsters.
"I'll hold my fire," Gelias said. She barely heard him.
She darted forward, dashing to the right. Being caught between the Monsters would be foolish and overly vulnerable; as much as she hated to admit it, Rory had been right to pull her out.
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She got up real close, close enough to see the decaying flesh of the Undead Clerk while it still "lived" and moved. She could see the Dungeon darkness, so unlike her own, flowing under the translucent gray skin in a mockery of blood.
She had to get up close to do this. Her blade was simple steel, not shaping Gem. Her destiny remained her own, but in times like these she lacked the raw combat power Gear granted. A full-power swing of her arms was within human levels, no matter how much power she needed. She wouldn't be taking off any heads like this.
She slashed the creature's neck.
Blood curdled out of the wound, scabbing on contact with the Dungeon air, until it shined like metal.
"Fly Straight My Arrow," Gelias said casually, and he shot an arrow right at creature's neck, where it bounced right off.
That didn't seem good.
The Monster had some idea that she was there. Sure, she might've been cloaked in perception-stymieing darkness, but that left a trace. It left a void in the air that the non-perceptive but bright could trace.
Plus, it was hard to ignore if your throat burst open.
She panicked,. Her Gem surged with sharp, erratic spikes of her magic, refracting and reflecting off the surfaces within.
Like a pufferfish expanding or an octopus inking, her Shadow Cloak blasted the cubicle with a Fog of Darkness.
"I must say," Gelias said, "I'm not sure I understand your plan."
"That's why I asked you to come up with one!"
"I can't shoot what I can't sense," Gelias said. "So… undo that."
"Shut up," Beatrice said. "I needed a reprieve."
She didn't feel great about all of this. Truthfully, she'd felt downright rotten ever since the Granavale Tournament. She could excuse losing to Rory, since he was a boy and had hit his growth spurt early. She could excuse losing to Gelias, since he was an elf.
But losing to Archmund? Her own cousin? Who didn't even remember her?
Who had, by all accounts, spent the last five years slacking off while she'd been practicing, yet had somehow equaled if not surpassed her?
Her metal knife felt dead in her hand. It might have been paper, for all the good it had done her.
She walked up behind the Monster — she could see through the fog, even if no one else could — and stabbed it deep, straight for the spine.
Her blade met bone.
She wondered if it was time to pull it out — but she felt the dark blood oozing around her knife, crystallizing, becoming denser, harder, more defensive.
So she pushed deeper, as the creature collapsed onto its knees.
Deeper, until it pierced the bone, as the creature's head met the Dungeon floor.
Deeper still, until it ground through marrow, as the creatures limbs flailed in all directions, and she straddled its back to keep her grip.
Even deeper, until the tip of her knife felt as if it was pushing against stone. Against the coagulated darkness on the other side.
She wrenched her blade out the side, feeling like the Buried King. And then a strike to the other side, to sever the head cleanly.
The Monster collapsed on the ground, a puppet with its strings cut. Its darkness began dissipating, oozing into her own, malevolent red-black against her purple-blue.
"Beatrice? Are you alright in there?" Gelias called.
There was a smile on her face. Did this count as a solo kill?
She walked up to the other Monster, which was blind in the darkness. It had made its way against a wall and was groping its way slowly towards the cubicle exit a step at a time.
Driven by instinct, it hugged the wall.
She stabbed her knife through its throat and spine, pinning it to the wall. Its arms flailed around, a disadvantage of a frontal assault; she dodged back, again jerking her knife to the side, spraying droplets of black blood through the cell.
Its head was only half-severed. There was the tiniest bit of spine still connected, just enough for the illusion of life. Even as she watched, darkness began knitting its flesh back together. She darted in, intent on striking the other side, but the creature waved its arms in the general direction of where its head was still connected, stopping her from getting close.
Nothing to it. She attacked from the other side, smacking the creature's torso, like kicking a tree to shake nuts out of it. Its head hinged off, like a snapped branch, and even still rivulets of darkness bridged its neck and torso.
It wouldn't be easy for her to fight her way in and get close enough.
Gritting her teeth, she held up her Gem.
"Gelias, get ready!"
She drew the darkness into it, clearing the cubicle, to see Gelias's arrow, nocked on his bow.
"Fly Straight, My Arrow!" Gelias whispered the instant the darkness lifted, but he might as well have crowed like a rooster, the way Beatrice's heart lifted with relief.
His arrow pierced the remaining bits of spine connecting the Undead Clerk's head to its body, and with a thump its head fell off, its body dissolving into smoke, its Gemgear clattering to the ground.
She took a breath she didn't realize she'd been holding.
This had been the most intense real fight of her life. Fighting the Seven-Fingered Starbeasts had started to feel more like farming or horse maintenance or some tedious peasant task after doing it enough times. There was no real sense of danger, no real fear that the beasts that Archmund had guided them to could actually pierce through their Bodily Barriers or Shadowed Cloaks. The same went for animated skeletons. They already looked dead.
But these undead creatures? She'd had no idea how dangerous they were, but they could stop Gelias's attacks, and for a moment she wasn't sure she'd get through them, and that had terrified her.
But she'd dug deep into her soul and found the will to cut through their flesh.
Would commoner flesh feel the same?
It wasn't unheard of for nobles to be set upon commoner rebellions.
"Don't get too comfortable," Gelias said, glancing down at her from his perch. "There's still one more to take down."
As if on cue, a shrill cry of pain rang out from Archmund's pet commoner.
And then it was quiet.
Too quiet.