REAPER SCANS
Surviving as a Broken Hero
[Author – Farlight]
[Proofreader – Harley]
Chapter 127 - Demons (2)
“Velle!” I yelled. “Can you do anything here?!”
They seemed endless, the demons. Whenever we took one down, another just seemed to fill its place.
Still, the Awakeners were making progress. Around half an hour had passed since the battle started, and the circle around the city constricted ever closer around the enemy city.
“Got it!” she yelled, concentrating on the glowing blue staff in her hand and gathering a wave of condensed water. “Get back!”
I hastily retreated behind her with the others.
Demons snarled at us as we ran back. A particularly large ogre, its skin as tough as stone and an eye missing from some previous battle far in the past, took rumbling steps over the earth to follow.
A moment later, a beam of water gushed forward, the concentrated power of it blasting the ogre away in its wake like it was nothing more than a child’s doll. Still, the water continued onward and into the city, parting the demon tide for a brief moment.
“Come on!” I yelled, running into the gap as quickly as I could.
I only hoped the Awakeners would continue pushing forward behind us. We risked being surrounded, but we had to keep pushing forward while morale was still in our favor.
Many Awakeners hesitated after the first rush at the demons largely failed, but they were finding that the monsters weren’t as overpowering as they first seemed—the Awakeners had simply gone in without backing each other up.
“Keep them off of us, Eve!”
She and Velle were on crowd control duty. The sheer number of monsters made anything Bernard, Koise, or I could do seem inconsequential.
Still, it didn’t stop Koise from firing pinpoint arrows at the largest demons approaching us, taking them down before they could become an issue.
Dead ogres and flying lizard-things collapsed one by one in the vicinity, arrows piercing through their heads and leaving holes through their bodies, killing them before they even knew what happened.
They didn’t exist in the world of the Merge, but I suspected the arrows could even pierce a tank’s armor.
‘And Bernard is holding defense for Velle and Eve pretty well.’
The man swung his greatsword in swathes of death around the two casters on one side while Rhil took the other, darting around in blasts of electricity.
Of course, the demons had realized Velle and Eve were the biggest threats and concentrated their attention there, but Rhil was so fast that she even directed small, concentrated blasts of lightning from her hands to take down any arrows or projectiles the demons sent their way, perhaps due to her Perception and Agility being so high.
Meanwhile, Bernard was like an impassable wall, and his sword cut through armored demon bodies like a scythe through straw.
Waves of cold air rippled over us as Eve gathered the heat in the area toward her and unleashed it in occasional bursts of circular fire spreading outward, keeping the majority of the horde from simply piling on top of us.
Standing at the front, my new control over stone proved useful in collapsing partially destroyed buildings we passed nearby, blocking the demons’ progress toward us, even if only temporarily.
Every now and then, Velle gathered another stream of water, and I moved aside for her to clear the way again.
Like that, we made slow, steady progress through the demons and separated from the Awakeners who still battled the monsters around the outside of the city. They may have also been closing in, but not nearly with our speed.
If even one of us went down, things would take a turn for the worse. Like a well-oiled machine of war, each a part working as a whole, we were able to make it halfway to our goal—the towering keep at the city’s center—when we saw the first sign of the fog.
“Spread out!” I yelled when I saw it.
We’d gone past the tendrils of flesh clinging to the tops of the crumbling buildings around the city until then, but they’d remained stationary, save for the occasional orange eye-opening to watch us and the other battles going on.
“What?! Why?” Koise yelled back.
The confusion was understandable, given how much progress we were making.
“The tendrils are leaking the fog!” I yelled back, pointing up at a tendril of flesh in particular that oozed out an insidious purple fog.
Alone, the amount would have been minuscule, but the fleshy appendages all over the city were slowly releasing the same fog from pores over their surface, causing it to gently fall from above us like rain and settle.
Sure enough…
“My skills!” Velle yelled. “They’re being cut off!” She still tried to fire more beams of water, but each took more time to cast than the last and drained her more than ever. It was only a matter of time before she couldn’t cast at all.
“Save your mana!” I replied. “We talked about this, remember?!”
She nodded, recalling the strategy we’d shared before the battle.
* * *
Reaper Scans
[Author – Farlight]
[Proofreader – Harley]
Join our discord for updates on releases! https://dsc.gg/reapercomics
* * *
A few hours prior…
“This purple mist… you say it takes away your ability to use any skills?” Velle asked as we walked through the forest. She batted a particularly nasty-looking wasp-like insect aside and sent a little blast of water at it when it tried to take revenge.
The insect tumbled from the air in a dramatic spiral, plunking to the ground with a hardly-audible ‘tic’.
“How are we supposed to get to the Demon King if we can’t use any abilities?” Koise added, fiddling with an arrow in his hands, gently tapping the razor-sharp arrowhead and scratching trees with it as we passed.
“You’ll still have your baseline stats,” I explained. “If it gets to that point, traditional attacks will work as good as ever, meaning you and Bernard shouldn’t have too much of an issue if you’re ready for it.
“What about us?” Rhil piped in, waving to indicate herself, Eve, and Velle. “We rely on our skills more than you three. I can still fight a bit without them, but Velle… she turned her head to look at the other woman, as if wondering if she had some secret finesse with weapons.
Velle, of course, shook her head in denial. “Right. I’ll be useless. I only have this staff…”
“Then you’ll have to stay in the middle until you can use spells again,” I continued, wiping a bead of sweat from my forehead. “As for Eve…”
“I’ll be fine,” Eve cut in. “The fog won’t affect my ability to use fire.”
“Huh…” Rhil trailed off. “Is that an elf thing or something? Is that why they’re attacking humans first?”
“Kind of…” Eve said, hesitating. She didn’t want to explain why that was, but it wasn’t necessary, so long as she could still cast. “Anyway, it won’t affect me at all, Aizen has seen that.”
“She’s right.” I nodded. “I’ll also still be able to use my abilities.”
The others gave me questioning looks. For it to be an elf thing might be understandable, but why would I, a human, still be able to use my skills?
“It’s a long story, but we’ll just say I have resistance to the fog.” Some knew about my Second System already, and I had no issue with the others knowing, but it was too much to explain when we had the battle ahead to focus on.
“If we see the fog, it’ll be best to group around Velle and let Eve take over crowd control. Just protect her and move forward when she clears the way.”
“Can you even do that?” Koise scratched his nose for a moment. “Keep them back and clear the way by yourself?”
It was a great question. If she could, then would she even need us?
“I believe I can…” she replied, “but I need to save my energy for as long as possible.”
* * *
Waves of fires and heat surged around her, forming around the signatures of her party members in her mind’s eye—she saw everyone around her, anything giving off heat, and a mental note was enough to mark them as ‘friendly’.
Such control would’ve been unthinkable to her before, but the more of herself she lost to the fire—mentally and physically—the greater her ability grew.
Feeling the heat wash over her mind, a fiery ecstasy washed through her body, begging her to Pull more, to Push more, to conduct such a symphony of fire that it would burn the world.
If anything, holding back was harder than letting it go. Crystals of ice formed in mere moments and evaporated in the following wave of fire in a constant cycle of cold and fire.
She avoided Pulling from her allies, but everything else, including the demons—especially the demons—was fair game, and their bodies ran hotter than most, perhaps due to the corruption running in their veins.
‘More…’ she told herself, daring to toe the line between the building heat in her mind and her ability to reason.
Another Pull. Wintry cold. Ice and condensation. A wave of heat. Fire, death, and ashes. A swirling wind of pressure from the constantly changing and expanding zone of temperature…
She became the eye of the growing storm.
At first, the others had to keep the occasional demon or projectile from breaking through to reach her, but eventually, a dome of heat built around them from her steady Pulling, setting fire to anything it touched.
An unstoppable force headed straight for the Demon King’s keep.
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