Herald of death

Cedric stops approaching a few meters away. "I need to know how you summoned Alaric Vornhart; his ghost knows secrets you couldn't fathom the value of. Anyone working for me will profit from it, and you can be one of them."

"What is stopping me from keeping everything for myself?" Ethan asks.

"You don't know what questions to ask him, and I doubt you have the resources to build the expeditions required to find these secrets." Cedric summons an oval diamond in between his fingers. "Thaddeus must have told you of my reputational tribulations. Bringing back secrets from ancient times would go a long way in mending that. I can get you everything your heart desires – wealth, status, land, abilities, training, gear, women, and more. Anything short of giving you the throne."

"What about Caelum Cindralis?" Ethan asks.

"The Betrayer?" Cedric asks, puzzled. "I haven't heard anything about him past the fall of Kingsreach. I could lend you my network if you want to find him, no matter how ill-advised it would be."

"I already know where he is. But he's in an inaccessible place," Ethan says, surprising both nobles. "What I need to discover are his hideouts, contacts, and networks."

Both Cedric and Thaddeus melt to black smoke before reforming, rewound by a few seconds.

"– Anything short of giving you the throne," Cedric repeats.

'So, there is a way to find Cindralis in my time through Cedric's networks,' Ethan concludes. "What about Thaddeus? He won't accept anything from you."

A light grin forms on Cedric's face. "Well, I was thinking of letting you take care of him as a show of commitment. Sealing our allegiance in crime."

"He wants you to do it because when my family calls upon my soul, it will appoint you as my murderer," Thaddeus says.

"It would require them to find the body and a priest not only capable but also willing to cast the required ability and to do it fast," Cedric retorts. "Unless you plan on staying with us as a vengeful spirit. Actually, do if you can; I've uses for a soul."

"And if I refuse?" Ethan asks.

"Then I'll kill the both of you," Cedric answers. "Alaric's secrets will be mine sooner or later. What I can't allow is for my reputation to be tarnished some more. Even less letting you get stronger through his teachings."

"That would be a problem either way. I don't picture you as the honor-amongst-thieves type. Letting me get stronger than you, as you say, isn't an option for you," Ethan says. "Showing your allegiance forced Thaddeus to seek me out; it didn't have to be now but in the near future. You make both of us vanish, maybe get the secret out of me, and pretend you were bedridden the whole time. But what about Razak? We are close to the camp; he will hear our fight."

"It won't be a fight," Cedric laughs. He raises his right hand and summons a large, scaled egg. "The local wyverns are a matriarchal species. We hunt the males, because even Razak would have trouble with the local female. Too bad someone left two of her only three eggs at the base of his domain."

Ethan flashes predator's sight and hears the roars of the beast coming from the staircase leading to the domain. Orc battle cries mix with it as they rush each other.

"I had to kill the contents to store them in my inventory. That will send her into a murderous rage." Cedric unsummons the egg. He extends his left hand to summon a long sword scarred by black veins that drip acid onto the ground. "Last chance to tell me how you summoned Alaric and to join me."

"Don't listen to him," Thaddeus mutters. "He will kill you either way. He made his decision hours ago."

Ethan glances at Thaddeus with a raised eyebrow. Didn't he just make it clear that he knows already? He shifts his gaze back to Cedric and summons Stormshard, alongside his armored clothes.

"You don't want to do that. I've seen you fight Razak, and I must say, I found you lacking. You may be physically strong and have that riffraff, instinctual fighting style, but there is no rhyme or reason in your ability set. And that's without mentioning your poor use of the ones you have," Cedric banters. He spins his blade, hurling poison towards Ethan's face.

Ethan moves his head away from the trajectory of a drop. "I wouldn't be so sure if I were you. Our last fight didn't end so well."

Cedric laughs wholeheartedly. "Are you being serious? Did speaking like us trick your mind into thinking you are my equal?"

Ethan uses Insight, but the resulting status appears doctored.

"If we fight together, we have our chances," Thaddeus whispers. He coughs and spits blood onto the ground.

Ethan feels something wet in his moustache and touches it with his fingers to find blood. 'Did he poison us?'

"A naive hope," Cedric says. He twitches his head, and sickly green scales appear over his skin alongside yellow, serpent eyes. He extends his scaled right hand; liquid spikes shoot out of it towards Thaddeus.

'Prescience, Strengthening,' Ethan thinks, simultaneously casting a dermal shield. He lunges forward; his muscles protest, hindered by the unknown affliction.

Cedric deflects Ethan's blade to the side and answers with a thrust. It misses its mark as Ethan parries Cedric's attack at the last moment. Cedric snarls, "You can still move?"

Locked in a flurry, Ethan cast a debilitating hex. The dark tendrils bounce off Cedric, vanishing into the air.

"Dark magic? You are full of surprises," Cedric mocks. Phantomatic snakes shoot out of his skin; Ethan tries to cut them, but Stormshard passes through them uselessly. They disengage from each other, Ethan dodging the snakes.

Prescience tells Ethan where Cedric is moving too. He levels his left hand at the spot and summons a lightning bolt. It strikes Cedric square in the chest, but the lordling doesn't flinch. The spell burned a hole in his toga; it shows the unmarred scales below.

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"He harmonized with a Hexward Viper; you'd need a much stronger spell," Thaddeus says through gritted teeth. A melting, crystalline spike protrudes from his side, soaking his tunic with blood.

"I gathered," Ethan comments.

Thaddeus' fingers glow with the bright blue of raw Ether. He places them around his wound, and the spike falls off, pushed by his regenerating flesh. Judging by the amounts of Ether he absorbs from the outside, his spell costs a lot.

"Thaddeus, if only you had specialized yourself in healing, maybe the two of you would stand a chance," Cedric gawks. He summons a set of plants on his tongue and swallows them. A distortion of the light emanates from his skin, spreading like a dense gas.

Thaddeus raises his right hand to the sky and summons a rotating gale that drags air from above and expels the poison to the sides.

"You have made progress, Thaddeus. When you arrived here, I doubt you could have used any spell while crushed by my soul." Cedric swats the air with his right hand, and a rushing wind rages from him and onto them. "But even my poor spellcasting can overpower yours now. It must eat a renowned adventurer like you from the inside."

'His soul?' Ethan uses their dialog to imagine his muscles' physiological process. He pictures his brain sending a signal down his spine and through his nerves. His muscle fibers tighten, pulling on bone through tendons. He imagines it all in his mind – quadricep clenching, hip rotating, leg pushing off the ground. But his efforts are met with the same struggle, unable to alleviate whatever affliction Cedric inflicted on him.

"Your family got lucky catching a monster to train on," Thaddeus says through gritted teeth. He extends his right hand to the sky and shoots a cone of ice spikes. They shatter like grenades into levitating snow, freezing the air. His descending column of wind bursts with power as the cold air descends, thwarting Cedric's gale.

Carried by the wind, Ethan lunges forward while summoning a martial echo. He equips his clone with Phantom Reaver, and in synchronicity, they come at Cedric from both sides.

Cedric moves with sudden haste. Instead of parrying, he dodges Ethan's blade with jerking motions. His speed overwhelms Prescience, casting dozens of potential futures in the next tenth of a second.

Crystalline spikes shoot out from the ground under Cedric's feet, forcing him to dodge them.

Ethan dashes backward. Landing, he realizes Cedric cut through his coat, causing shallow wounds on his lower chest. His martial echo dies, taking with it some of Ethan's life force.

Cedric snaps his right hand's fingers, unleashing a ripple through the Ether.

Pain crawls into Ethan from his wounds, burning his inside like white-hot parasites. He rolls up his right sleeve to find his forearm taken by black, expanding veins carved onto his skin by necrosis.

A wave of Ether crashes through Ethan from Thaddeus' location. It stops the rot from spreading any further but doesn't heal the already dire damage.

Darkness spreads from Cedric, overtaking the world and obscuring the sky. Ethan's body locks as it passes over him, freezing him in place. Cedric vanishes, replaced by a shifting, distant mass of slivering scales.

Ethan recognizes the ability as Aura of Dread but senses more than when Viktor Blackwood used it on him. The endless darkness feels like the soul realm in which Alaric met him.

An endless hunger spreads from where Cedric stood. Primitive fear overtakes Ethan's body; it dreads the predator lurking in the darkness. The mass of scales unfurls into a gargantuan snake who moves for a strike that will swallow Ethan whole.

A protective aura surges from Ethan's shadow, replacing the fear with warmth and comfort. It forms as a giant shadowy maw that snaps the imaginary snake's head and dispels Cedric's Aura of Dread.

Cedric staggers forward, catching himself from falling as blood drools along his arms from his neck. He touches it to find bite marks piercing his scaled skin.

"Russ' Aura of Dread ranked up."

'Good boy,' Ethan praises Russ as he pushes Strengthening back to its soft limit and triggers Weapon Aura while feeding Ether to Stormshard. He takes a deep breath and closes his airways. With a sonic boom he lunges at the stunned Cedric, his path lighting with thundering arcs of electricity.

Cedric moves back, triggering his acceleration ability to dodge Ethan's descending blade.

"Stop!" Ethan commands, powering his full heart of Ether with a sliver of life force.

The Aetherian word unleashes Ether upon Cedric, freezing his body in place. His eyes go wide, his mind racing as he loses control and sees the electric guillotine descending on his neck.

The Ether that replaces what was expanded by Ethan's command latches to his heart like parasitic vines. The existence of an ability capable of poisoning the Ether didn't cross Ethan's mind; a mistake he instantly regrets. He coughs mid-lunge, his muscles seize, and his abilities falter.

For a moment, the battlefield stands still, the nobles commanded to, and Ethan struggling against a new kind of pain.

Ethan has been cut, stabbed, shot, poisoned, frozen, burned, and electrocuted enough times to dull any agony. But now, it feels like his own blood has turned hostile, boiling through every artery and vein. His heart hammers, each of its attempts to expand a ventricle met with a compressing force. His throat spasms. The breath he had sealed erupts; his lungs fill with outside air that comes like knives stabbing him from the inside.

Cedric watches, eyes still wide, but his mouth now curling into a cruel grin as his body unlocks. He thrusts his blade into Ethan's abdomen, targeting his main liver.

Another poison spreads into Ethan from the blade, pulsating through his body in heated waves.

Cedric laughs, holding his chest to calm his heart. He twists the blade and gawks, "That was a powerful spell; you must be proud of it."

An invisible claw grabs Ethan's chest and pulls him back to Thaddeus' side. The noble follows up by grabbing a bright green crystal from his satchel, breaking it to release life Ether.

Cedric lunges at Thaddeus, extending his clawed hand forward.

Absorbing the life Ether with one hand, Thaddeus summons a spheric shield with the other. His eyes glow green as he extends the first hand towards Ethan, disregarding Cedric's approach.

Its scales parting the magic, Cedric's hand pierces through the shield to close in on Thaddeus' neck.

Thaddeus smirks, and a series of circular engravings glow up at his feet, mimicking Aranthor's large arrays. It makes him vanish, letting Cedric move past where he was, and then reappear, now aiming his glowing hand at Cedric's back.

Cedric aims a finger without having time to look back and shoots a firebolt that misses, burning uselessly behind Thaddeus.

A blade made of scaled chitin shoots out of Thaddeus' hand, stabbing Cedric in the spine. It sends Ether into Cedric's nerves, paralyzing him from the neck down.

Cedric melts into Thaddeus' shadow, his misfired fire spell extending it past his feet.

Thaddeus grabs the handle of his summoned longsword as it shoots out of his skin and falls into stance, glaring at his shadows cast by the two moons. With his offhand he throws another life Ether crystal below Ethan. It shatters, and the Ether it held rushes into Ethan's wounds, guided by Thaddeus' threads, to heal and close them. "You should always carry healing and cleansing items."

"I didn't have a chance to refill in some time," Ethan says. He rolls to his feet, getting the pain under control by freezing his Ether into place. It cancels all his abilities. Controlling it, Ethan tries to discover why his own Ether is poisoning him but finds nothing. He mimics Thaddeus, checking the only other nearby shadows – his.

Cedric shoots out from Ethan's largest shadow, creating distance before Ethan can react. His toga falls off in bloodied rags, leaving him only pants pierced by gaping bite marks. Despite their lethal appearance, the wounds do not bleed, sealed by blackened, sticky blood.

Russ growls in Ethan's mind.

'Good job.' Ethan summons his strength potion injector in his closed hand and jabs it into his neck, gaining a part of what Strengthening would give him.

"I have enough Ether left for a spell that can hurt him," Thaddeus whispers. Next to the man, Ethan can sense said Ether moving to Thaddeus' brain and eyes. "Can you still fight? I need him static for a few seconds."

"I'll make it work," Ethan whispers back.