Fate Alchemist - A Regression Academy LitRPG

Wulf stopped counting how many fiends he assassinated. It was in the single digits, but he was too focussed on finding the next hiding spot, ensuring he had enough poison, and that he killed them quickly.

If they died quickly, they couldn't alert others to their position. He had no idea how many fiends there were, and he didn't want to find out.

If he took them one at a time, it was doable. Some struggled hard, and he took a few more hits across the body. One chipped the panels in his gut area, and another cracked the outer panels of his leg. Overall, the Wraith's body integrity dropped to seventy percent.

Considering Wulf was going up against Golds, it was the best he could hope for.

With each blade he dragged across a fiend's throat, or every time he plunged it into their soft, unprotected necks and clenched the blade's hilt, injecting a drop of poison, he got slightly better at placing his blows for a quick kill.

The others helped, too. When he needed a fiend to hold still, Kalee assisted. Or, when he needed a blow to break their armour—if he aimed the blow poorly, or couldn't see a gap in their carapaces—Kalee would angled a spell Skill and increase the speed and force of the strike.

If he needed a distraction, Irmond was always there to launch an arrow into the opposite wall, creating a crack, or fly off on Speckles and give the demon a target, only for Wulf to leap in from behind and kill it. With every strike, the viridian blades held. There wasn't a single crack along their length.

It had been an hour. The map was going haywire, not understanding that they'd descended to the second level. It kept ordering them to turn back, while showing glimpses of the second level's layout. Then it blinked, the ink swirled and shifted, and the map changed back to a depiction of the first level.

Not very helpful. Eventually, he ripped the sheet down, crumpled it, and tossed it to the corner, where it wouldn't be distracting him.

It was only when they reached the down-shaft to the third level that Wulf paused to consider where he was. He'd tried to keep track of their route, but sometimes, he had to change course so rapidly that he lost track of where he was going.

By now, they were lost. He was banking on the Academy coming in to help.

He circled around the down-shaft, peering into the depths below. If the walls of the dungeon up here had been dark gray, down there, they were black. Heat swelled up, and not just from the fiends. He was pretty sure streams of magma were pouring from holes in the walls.

So far, the dungeon was empty of monsters. There might have been a few rooms in the distant reaches of the dungeon where there was still loot to be found, but the fiends had cleared out the best of it.

"What if they've destroyed the dungeon's core?" Seith asked. "Or what if they plan on destroying it?"

"That…wouldn't be ideal." Wulf shook his head, and so did Wraith. "Everyone needs the resources of this dungeon. It would be a massive loss to the Oronith program if the dungeon got cleared out permanently."

"Should we go down and investigate?" Kalee asked.

"What if there are High-Golds?" Irmond asked. "Like, we've encountered only Middle-Golds for the last few demons. If they're getting stronger, maybe it means the more powerful ones are waking up later, and we're gonna have to deal with, like, High-Golds or something."

"We could probably take a single High-Gold if we could surprise it," Wulf said. "And if we could use both swords at the same time. But I agree. It's a bad idea to go down there."

He stepped away from the edge.

"...At least, not until we've finished our upgrades," he finished.

Irmond let out an audible groan.

"Irmond," Wulf said, "I need you to keep watch. We need to finish up our hand."

"I think I've got the shape slightly better," Seith said. "But come see for yourself. It just feels like it's missing something."

Wulf held his arm out, then deactivated the dream-link, locking Wraith in place for a moment. He climbed out the back hatch, using his scissors as a climbing pick, and swung around onto the arm. Still inside his jade golem, he scrambled down the Wraith's arm until he reached the viridian hand.

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Halfway up its forearm, the Wraith's paalchite deepstone merged with the viridian hand of the golem.

Seith met him halfway up the arm, and they stood there, staring at it for a few seconds. It was a black hand, but that was about it. She'd sized it as he asked, knocking off chunks and making it fit onto the Wraith. It was smooth, though being originally from a golem, the individual stones that made up its structure weren't carved with intent. He pursed his lips. "Indeed, it fits now. But you're right, something feels missing."

"We could try to shape it into something else…" Seith suggested. "What's it supposed to do?"

"No idea." Wulf crossed his arms. "You know, part of me was thinking that it'd just look cool to give Wraith a black hand."

"You're a sixty year old demon slayer, and you're concerned about how cool the hand looks?"

"Well…" He shrugged. "Look, it crossed my mind. But that's not the point. I listened to my gut, and my gut was telling me to do this. If we need a guide, we should listen to our guts, and we should listen to what the hand wants to be."

"What it wants to be?"

"I can't explain it," Wulf said. "There's a feeling I get. It's almost as if my ingredients know what they're supposed to become, and want us to help them reach their fate."

"I don't sense it."

He grimaced, then said, "This hand needs armour built in."

"We don't have any more viridian or paalchite," Seith warned.

"It wants the materials of its slain enemies," Wulf said. It sounded incredibly dark, a little unnecessary, when he spoke it aloud, but the hand knew what it wanted. It wanted to protect by intimidation, and it wanted to strike fear with the sight of it.

"What better way to strike fear into demons than with a demon's carapace?" Wulf asked. "We have armour. Middle-Gold grade armour. It's just laying around in our wake. Let's use it."

He returned to the cockpit, and they walked back the way they came—until they reached the corpse of the last fiend they'd slain.

Its innards had turned to black soup, and even its bones were starting to melt. The inner portion of its carapace was sticky, as if the alchemy of the poisonous potion had partially dissolved it, too.

He sawed off the demon's hand, and with Seith's help, they took chunks of the carapace. It didn't hold its form when the flesh below had been destroyed so thoroughly by Wulf's poison, but the chunks of carapace were still hard on the outside.

They didn't have a crane or the resources of the Academy hangar, so instead, Wulf used Wraith itself to pick up the chunks of carapace and lay them on top of the hand. Seith made minor adjustments, fitting chunks of the demon's hard shell on top of the hand and turning it into a gauntlet. They stuck to the viridian and bonded immediately, flooding the hand with remnants of the poison.

It was a good thing the hand wasn't living. It couldn't transmit the poison through the rest of the Wraith and to Wulf. And, best of all, he'd unintentionally used alchemy to create the hand. As he watched, the poison sucked the colour out of the carapace, turning it glassy-black, like regular obsidian.

"It…looks done," Seith said. "But it doesn't feel done. I get the impression if we add more stuff to it, though, that's not going to help."

"Probably not," Wulf agreed. "It doesn't feel done because we haven't finished the connection to the Wraith yet. I didn't get a message, and neither did you. I need…I need to finish connecting the hand and pushing the mountain spirit's form back out through the hand. And then the Field will register it as complete."

"Guys…" Irmond warned. "Something's coming. I can hear it."

Wulf didn't hear anything yet, but he turned in a circle, then ran back to the broader, taller room where the down-shaft lay. An orange glow simmered up from an adjoining hallway, getting brighter quickly.

"Something I can be useful with," Kalee said. "Fiends."

"It's coming fast," Irmond said.

"No time to hide," Wulf mumbled. "They're moving fast, like they knew where we were waiting."

Wulf was about to run. He could head back the way he came, but the moment he stepped down the hallway, another orange glow appeared. They were cutting him off, and moving with coordination. He drew his single sword and gave it a flick, distributing the poison through it.

The two fiends emerged from the hallways at the same time, cutting him off and closing fast. One was unusually fat. With each step, ripples rolled through its bulging belly. But beneath its heft, it had untold strength. Its clawed hands ripped the floor with each step, carving glowing channels in the rock.

The other fiend carried a crude blade. It wasn't exactly a sword. The entire thing was an enormous crescent, covered in rust, black blight, and with chunks taken out of it. It had no hilt, and the fiend just gripped the bottom of the blade. With each step, it swung the blade, cleaving rock off the dungeon walls.

High-Gold. Both of them were High-Gold.

Wulf sprang back, launching Wraith over the down-shaft and landing with a heavy thud. "We need to take them one at a time. Kalee, when one jumps, can you drag it down?"

"Got it!" she replied.

The fat fiend bounded over the hole, thundering after Wulf. He held out his arm, and though the obsidian hand still hung limply, Kalee conjured a spell skill through it. Runes circled Wraith's arm, and a pulse of gravity dragged the fat fiend down.

It didn't have as much effect as it would against a lower-tier fiend, but it was enough to take the height out of its jump. Its body smashed into the sharp edge of the shaft, and it plummeted down to the third level.

Now, there was only one to deal with.