Chapter 239: The Crystal Leviathan (Patreon)

Well, when I said I didn't trust my past self to make anything simple, I meant it, fully. And the fact that Ceil herself had hinted at it only confirmed it. Not directly— it seemed even she had limitations imposed by her creator about how much she could unveil regarding the trial itself— but just enough that I knew a final battle would be coming.

She left a few more hints, according to Curious, about what we could do to prepare. And Curious gave me a list of possibilities about what I could expect.

So I wasn't truly surprised when a crystalline claw gripped the shattered sky from the starry dimension beyond, pulling itself through the tear. Its face was once again similar to that of a leviathan, but entirely made up of differently colored crystals. Its massive head slowly emerged, then the body, and soon the entire thing floated in the space before me.

The moment it happened, I knew it was the signal of the end. I pressed my own senses against it and felt just how vast the difference was this time. It was incomparably lesser than Ceil though— and Ceil had never radiated such murderous intent as this crystal leviathan did.

Not just crystal, either, it seemed an amalgamation of both crystal and insectoid features. Its body had a carapace in places where the crystals weren't, multiple pairs of dragonfly-like wings that beat at an almost impossible speed, keeping it eerily still in the sky. Its claws were insectoid as well, and there was an abdomen that glowed with an iridescent hue.

Divinity. It had to be.

It looked serene, and yet the predatory vibes I felt from it were off the charts. Soon enough, the tear in space it had emerged from widened, taking the shape of a rectangle. The starry background blurred before reforming into the shape of a bright, ornamental door— covered in luxurious crystal, which, upon closer inspection, were thrumming with barely contained divinity. Kind of like the divinity equivalent of mana stones?

My eyes shone at it, but the only thing that dimmed my excitement was the massive indent in said doors— one that vaguely resembled the insectoid crystal leviathan's skull.

Well, if that wasn't telling you to defeat the final boss to loot the riches beyond, I didn't know what was.

"I think I know what this monster is, main body."

"Do you now?"

"More or less," she continued, her eyes fixed upward. "One of Ceil’s subtle prompts directed me toward a bestiary buried in the Kovraths' archives. It contained an addendum on outlander species. Given this realm’s position adjacent to the Spirit Plane, invasive entities occasionally breach it. The Kovraths lacked the vocabulary to categorize it, but an ancient king among them had recorded an engagement with this specific specimen. The ledger was exhaustive."

My eyes shone— but seeing the look on Curious's usually confident face turn to one of subtle hesitation was all I needed to know. I gritted my teeth and looked up. The leviathan hadn't moved yet. And the vanguard hadn’t either.

And I hated the part where I had to listen to Curious now instead of directly assimilating her knowledge like before. It was sort of a drawback I'd gotten with my now-upgraded Quantum Nexus.

While it literally made my clones as real as possible— they no longer had an expiry clock ticking on them— it also meant that when I actually dismissed or lost a clone, it would give me a backlash, and I wouldn't be able to summon that clone again for quite a while. While I did daydream about divinity-imbued explosion clones back-to-back until whatever I was fighting dropped dead, that just wasn't how this was going to work. Still, overall, I couldn't be more thankful for the upgrade. It was a drawback, but the benefits far surpassed it.

But it also meant I couldn't assimilate them back without waiting on a cooldown to resummon. Which also meant I wouldn't be able to learn anything from them that way.

It might seem like a dealbreaker, but it wasn't. I just had to plan around the cooldown.

I usually had Curious stay around for a week, doing her work, before I eventually assimilated her back to gain whatever knowledge she had worked on. It was how I kept things smooth. It usually took me waiting an entire day to resummon her, though. Lately, I had grown a bit lax about it— maybe I hadn't assimilated her in over two weeks. She must have discovered that knowledge then. I did want to do it somewhere in the middle, but last minute she had been too busy and at the center of everything, so I just couldn't pull her out for a day like that. And I certainly didn't want to take on her role myself. So, yeah.

"Anyways, want to tell me exactly what you learned?"

"Just that we don't really have a right way to deal with this thing—"

She began to speak just as my ears perked up, catching a strange hum coming from the leviathan.

"Ah, it's already initiating the first stage."

"Whatever doe-s t-h-a-t m-e-a-n-s—"

My eyes widened as I said that, almost like the words were falling out a little slowly for me. Even the people around were confused. I could already sense the fear they felt at the thing above, but they still put up a brave front. When their hushed whispers turned slower, I only realized as their fear started intensifying. The only thing I noticed was that they were talking even slower than I had, for some reason. Even their physical movements were noticeably slower.

I immediately accessed the Observer's Mark to her. "What the hell just happened?" I said, relieved that it wasn't subject to the same effect. "It's like everything around has become slow."

"That's exactly what happened. This thing is a monster when it comes to using debuff magic. And the thing about debuff magic is that, unless you have built-in resistance to it, it lands. It's not really a poison, but more like a curse— we don't have an immunity to it."

"But if it is indeed magic, I'm currently coating myself and everyone else in divinity. Shouldn't that have fundamentally resisted the debuffs?"

"Yes," she said, just as my own mind made the connection too. "It is using divinity to empower its own magic."

We said it together.

My eyes widened. Usually, with divinity, I'd see an iridescent sheen on the spell—it clung to it like a signature. But for whatever reason, I couldn't see anything like that from the magic the leviathan was casting.

But that didn't explain why Curious was unsettled. I was still capable of using about 95% of my speed, I tried moving my claw, and it felt like moving through something thicker than air, but still… She said it was just starting out.

She didn't need to say anything more. I understood why the people were even slower than me as I innately had more magic resistance and much higher Endurance stat. I remembered what the stat said: it would buff my resistance to both physical and magical things, not to mention my very scales.

So the debuff was much more forgiving to me due to my high stats and nature, even if it bypassed the coating of divinity. Others weren't so lucky.

I wished I knew how to cast magic using divinity itself. While I could imbue my spells with divinity and make them more potent, that still didn't mean I could use divinity itself as the base for pretty much everything. Doppelganger had explained how it worked: I needed a divine affinity first to even think about dabbling in its magic. Which I did not have right now. I had divinity, but no direct affinity. I was more broken than a shattered glass that way— I could only chew my lip and listen to how she herself was born with it. While I got divinity back, the affinity for it would have to wait in itself.

I'd gotten to know more about the nature of affinities, alignment abilities, and so on, but I knew now wasn't the time to be thinking about that. Moving my claws, I wove a simple [Lightning Bolt] spell, while Curious and Terrorist wove their own. I could hear Curious's Observer link vibrating— she was already discussing the situation with Serath, and Serath's projected voice was already echoing in everyone's mind, telling them of the peril.

Lily's dragon-bunny mages moved first, casting an elaborate sequence of spells immediately upon everyone, some sort of buffing magic to boost their speed and counteract the [Slow] debuff's effect. I, of course, felt myself boosted as well. Instead of 95%, I was above 140% now.

So it was almost a 50% buff to their overall speed.

I smiled. It was nice to have allies. We all synced our timing, imbuing the overtly charged lightning bolt with each other's power. "Fire!" I roared through the link and let out a massively destructive beam of pure lightning at the crystal leviathan.

The thing moved its carapace in a blink to shield the abdomen we'd targeted immediately. My eyes widened. So that carapace could move around its already durable-looking body.

The smoke cleared, and there was just a deep burning dent in the carapace as the leviathan’s multifaceted crystal eyes shifted and a grotesque mocking grin split its jaws. Then a pair of its dragonfly wings moved to the front and let out another eerie chime— and immediately, like another mark, it landed on me.

"I'm assuming it's using its wings as a sort of medium to land all these debuffs?" I asked Curious through the link.

"It's not going to be easy destroying them, main body." She paused for a moment. "You must maintain unrelenting offensive pressure. If you allow it to stack those curses, our resistances will bottom out before it prepares its final attack. Stacking debuffs is its win condition. Interrupt every chime!"

Nodding at her words, I immediately launched myself off the ground. She seemed to be communicating something to Serath, and Terrorist was standing there looking anxious. I had ordered her not to explode this time around. She was to assist Curious in any way she could. So she wasn't very thrilled to be here. Lazy had been told to stay out of the battle for a bit; I couldn't afford to lose her, for she had a role to play when it was over.

But just as I flew up, I felt the heat rise. The leviathan had opened its mouth, with magma-like dragon breath coiling beneath it. I primed my own dragonfire, imbued with divinity this time, and immediately dodged the concentrated ray of flames it lobbed my way. Even without direct contact, the ambient heat from the beam singed the edge of my scales. Only then did I realize what the second debuff must have been.

It had somehow lowered my resistance to fire itself. No way would that would have burned me this much otherwise.

I locked eyes with one of its wings and let loose my own version of a flamethrower—intensifying the heat as much as I could from my mouth while narrowing the area of effect to concentrate the flames. The pressurized beam of golden white dragonfire tore through the sky like a falling meteor. The leviathan once again moved its carapace into the line of attack, interposing it to protect the delicate looking gossamer wing.

The carapace shattered with a resounding explosion this time, and the leviathan staggered as it suddenly got knocked off its flight axis. The confident smirk on its nasty face finally seemed to fade a little as it actually gazed at me with predatory fury.

Good, the overgrown roach finally noticed me.

But not before the last pair of its wings moved to create that chime once again. Not this time. I was ready, closed my jaw and reignited the furnace in my chest before lobbing another flamethrower its way, aborting its chime it twisted violently in out of the way. A crystalline scythe came my way, but I easily dodged and bared my fangs as dragonfire surged through my maw once more.

If relentless aggression was the key to winning this fight, then Thalador help this creature, because I had accumulated an unholy amount of pent-up rage during my stay in this rigged purgatory. This overgrown cockroach better pray its carapace held together, because I wasn't letting off the throttle until it was dust!