Darkness and Hellfire

Isaac had just finished turning a few dozen coins into an ultimate finishing move in exchange for almost all of his mana. The poles of solid shadows had to be hard enough, and had to form fast enough, to allow them all to push the coins straight through the undead half spirit half corpse of a once great V'Nova paladin. He had truly outdone himself with the impressive display of both control and power. The downside being how drained he felt immediately after the act and the fact that he had been forced to stop boosting his physical capabilities and mental capacities. This meant that the sudden ring of iridescent black wrongness that expanded out from Farlen hit him too quickly for him to properly react. In the instant that his brain had, he realized that getting hit in the heart or head would be extremely bad. So instead of trying to dodge under it, or just take it with his raised arms, Isaac hopped. The ring hit him a few inches under his heart and nearly cut him in half. Isaac felt a line of numbness and agony form across the entire section of him that the line passed through.

Edward got his sword up in time to block the wave with the flat of his blade. He couldn't block all of it though and a line the width of his hand passed over the dip in his sword and passed straight through his left lung and shoulder blade. His armor's illusion was instantly broken but the armor itself took no damage. The attack had passed straight through it as if it hadn't even been there. Edward rushed at Farlen during the Death Knight's own recovery time. He didn't let the injury slow him any more than it absolutely had to.

Tiny droplets of black, indigo, and trace amounts of every other color of mana began forming and pouring out of Isaac and Edward's wounds and flowing towards Farlen. Isaac's entire regeneration rate was being spent trying to heal the damage that had and was still being done. His body, more specifically his cells, were being consumed and turned into fuel for Farlen. Edward's sword cut through Farlen's sword arm but the arm did not fall, instead, four more links were broken. Farlen swung around and nearly cleaved both Edward's sword and his neck in two. The Blade Master barely managed to avoid such a fate for both himself and his weapon but was instantly put in a bad position. He had been forced to lean backwards which left him far too off balance to react to the back swing properly. Farlen's sword came back down in a crushing blow towards the weapon that could so easily end him. Edward tried to make an awkward swing towards Farlen's midsection, mostly to get the weapon out of the incoming sword's path, but he wasn't fast enough. His leverage and structure was completely thrown off.

Farlen's sword came down, barely an inches shy of Edward's hilt, but a foot shy of his blade's tip. The result was much the same but not as detrimental as Farlen would have wanted. The final foot of Edward's blade was utterly obliterated as shards of platinum and steel were blasted downwards. Edward's sword was almost ripped from his grasp and he nearly toppled to the side from the sudden impact that rattled his bones and armor. The strike had imparted no less than four times as much force as it looked like it should have. Farlen's sword came back in an upswing, this time aimed at Edward's exposed neck from his stumble.

Edward twisted but he couldn't get his left arm entirely free of the incoming attack and was forced to sacrifice it. Farlen's blade hit the underside of Edward's arm, nearly at his armpit, and attempted to carve through it. Edward's armor was not cut through but that was both a blessing and a curse. Instead of the armor and arm being cleaved the whole way through, his upper arm absorbed all of the force from the strike across the entirety of it. His left humerus shattered and he was sent flying backwards, being drug along by his destroyed arm, for half a dozen feet before his heels hit the ground and he crashed into a backwards somersault. Edward's head was spinning, from the incredible amount of pain that he was in, for only a moment before his adrenaline completely blocked out any pain. His body knew that he was on the verge of death and held nothing back. That was how he ended up rolling backwards onto his left foot, right knee, and right fist that was still clenched around his sword's hilt. Edward looked up just in time to see Farlen's sword impact Isaac's as the dark mage tried desperately to hold the undead paladin back from finishing what he had started.

The mist that Farlen had rapidly absorbed from Isaac and Edward was actually the result of a curse. Edward had an item that made him extremely curse resistant which was why his left lung hadn't disintegrated. Isaac was not so lucky. His body had actively tried to split in half for a full second before his overwhelming death flames smothered the curse and put him back together. During that brief moment of horror at what was happening, and then the recovery from it, Edward had gone on the offensive and promptly lost. Isaac had seen just as Edward had taken a hit and been thrown backwards. Farlen had moved to finish him even before The Blade Master had hit the ground.

Isaac had pulled Truth out of his Inventory and boosted both himself and the sword as much as he could, which wasn't a lot, as he shadow-stepped into the path of the rampaging Death Knight. Isaac tossed a platinum coin into Farlen's path as soon as he arrived and tried to hit it with the flat of his blade like a bat. Farlen got the flat of his own sword in the way just in time to cause it to ricochet off to the side somewhere. That move had brought Farlen's attention directly back onto Isaac as he was clearly the originator of the platinum coin stabbing that he had recently gone through. Farlen swung at Isaac and instead of the dark mage dodging or parrying the attack, Isaac decided to try and halt the rampaging undead V'Nova with a strike of his own. Both the near legendary armament Truth and the amalgamation of adamantine and V'Nova craftsmanship impacted each other in the dead center between the living and the undead.

Isaac's sword hit the indigo stitching directly, Farlen had made sure that was where their attacks would make contact, and his reality magic blade fractured. If his grip was any less on the sword, then he might've been cut in half but instead he was thrown to the side along with his weapon that looked like a dropped pane of glass that was still somehow held together in its frame. Isaac let Truth finish breaking by cutting off its incoming power and then reformed it as he vanished and appeared in Farlen's path once again. This time Isaac tried to parry the attack but was instead sent crashing to the ground as Farlen's swing imparted far too much downwards force onto Isaac's sword. Isaac was forced to shadow-step out of the way of what would have been a lethal downwards swing from the undead V'Nova. He rolled to his feet while his left hand picked up the severed end of Edward's sword.

Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

Edward met Farlen in combat once again but this time he was noticeably slower and wasn't able to get even a single hit in. It was all Edward could do to keep from getting either himself or his sword cut in half. To make it all even worse, the mist from Isaac had caused Farlen to regain seven of his broken chain links. It was few enough that Farlen hadn't made the gamble to use the ability again, seeing as he had spent five to cast it and then lost four to a counter attack and only gotten seven back. It had managed to deal damage to Edward but it opened him up a lot immediately afterwards if Edward managed to react properly to the attack and dodge completely under it. That was another problem with the curse wave that Farlen had sent out, not only could it be blocked with platinum or divine power but it could also be dodged once someone knew what to expect.

Isaac appeared above Farlen and launched the end of Edward's blade through his head and into his chest with everything that he had. Isaac's hand was cut in the process but the broken end of The Blade Master's blade moved through the undead V'Nova as if it had been launched into the water and not a very violent entity. The shard of the blade clattered to the ground under Farlen and thirteen more of his chain links shattered. He had five remaining and reached up to grab onto Isaac as all five of the chain links flew together into his palm.

Isaac's arm was still outstretched from the throw and he was about to disappear but the chains and Farlen's hand found his own before he could finish falling through his own shadow. Normally he would have expected to shadow-step anyway as he could have just pushed enough shadows between himself and their contact point that a shadow-step would have been possible. That was not the case. This time the chains from Farlen's hand were stuck to his skin and began actively turning it to sludge as he attempted to consume Isaac's body in order to reform more chain links.

Edward's sword came in from the side and cleaved through Farlen's arm that held Isaac aloft but all that happened was one of the freshly forming chain links broke along with three others. Farlen swung at Edward with his other hand and drove the wounded Blade Master back. Isaac had decided to go on the offensive if he could not escape. He pulled a handful of platinum coins out of his Inventory and launched them into Farlen like rocks out of a slingshot. The rest of Farlen's chain links shattered and he became translucent but did not vanish.

Isaac was in more agony than his brain could comprehend as his hand was literally melted away and consumed in Farlen's grasp. He could feel his power retching and revolting at the contact of such a blasphemous amalgamation of mana, soul, and reality. Isaac decided that he only had one way out of it and chose not to think about it as his arm and just as a rope tying him to a sinking anchor as he cut off his own hand at the wrist and vanished. He appeared twenty feet away and collapsed as his vision blurred. His hand reformed in no time and his head was clearing but the human brain was not built to handle that kind of pain or the loss and reforming of limbs.

Edward moved in and stabbed Farlen in the side as he staggered from the sudden loss of Isaac. Isaac's hand was quickly consumed but Edward made sure that his blade stayed inside of Farlen even as he dodged out of the way of another of the undead's lethal swings. As soon as Isaac's hand was gone, and no new chain links were able to form, Farlen began to turn into wisps of indigo that quickly faded into the air. His sword dropped and came apart as the stitching was cooked off by reality's rejection of the power's very existence. It only took another two seconds for all traces of Farlen to be completely gone as he was blown away on the winds of mana that underpinned all of existence.

Edward staggered over to Isaac and dropped onto his knees while his good hand tried to reach into his Bottomless Bag. The first thing that he did was pull out a small vial of holy water and drink it. Steam instantly started to rise off of where the curse ring had hit him. The curse was still there, still active as it had been throughout the fight since it had hit him, but his curse resistance artifact had kept it from properly activating or spreading. It still hurt like all hells though and would not heal by any means until the curse was dealt with. After the holy water, Edward downed three healing potions, each one probably cost him three to five hundred gold, and then decided to wait for further healing until someone with healing abilities was able to rearrange the bone fragments in his arm.

"That sucked dragon dick." Edward swore and sat back on his heels. "We should have just ran and waited for help."

Isaac's whole world was still blurry but he could hear and understand the words that the Guild Master was saying. He would have laughed at the swear if his brain had managed to finish catching up by that point. He felt like he was wading through the record of all of the pain that he should have felt and was waiting for the rest of it to finish washing by so he could take control over himself again. It took another handful of seconds until Isaac was coherent enough to respond. "Yeah, you totally could have taken it by yourself." Isaac half joked.

"Fuck off." Was Edward's only tired response. They both knew that if Edward had known the target's capabilities from the start, and had even a day to acquire a few consumable items, that he could have taken down Death Knight Farlen by himself. A potion of Quicken, a few more jars of holy water, and maybe a divinely blessed weapon, so he could have used his own as a backup, would have been enough for the Blade Master to handle him. It was simply the fact that they were not prepared for the sudden battle, with an unknown foe with strange abilities, that had led to them both looking like they needed a long soak in a sauna and a few days of rest. After a long moment of silence, as Isaac's head finished clearing and Edward sat in agony, The Blade Master sighed. "Help me up, would you, and remind me to never go out with just you ever again."

Isaac grunted and pushed himself to his feet. "Why?" Isaac questioned and offered Edward's good hand his own to help the older man to his feet.

"Because," Edward began and then grunted as Isaac helped haul him to his feet. "I think just your presence is a jinx. You don't even have to say anything."

"Now that's just rude." Isaac grumbled but still looped the tired Guild Master's arm over his shoulder. They had really cut it close a few times against Death Knight Farlen and both of them knew it. One wrong move and one of them very easily could have died there, brought to the afterlife by a vengeful spirit that refused to pass on by itself.