[Ashborn-B1] 51. Undead Target (Patreon)

LI

Undead Target

Wings beat. The sky curved as Ashwing’s beak sliced through the air.

I held onto my breath. The pressure in my chest pushed against the bubble expanding in my skull. There was no room for failure on our part…but I was planning on testing a few things during these battles.

Ashwing’s talon unclasped when we were about twenty feet from the ground.

The Snow Moon heiress dropped like a stone, and still her hair didn’t flutter. A well-timed platform of ice broke her fall. Her blade slipped out of its scabbard without a sound. Ever-present mist poured out of the empty sheath, then the ice shattered underneath and Aurille hurled forwards, mist trailing in her wake. She was a blur even to Ashwing’s enhanced sight.

The hood of the tome-wielding undead snapped back as did that of the entire party. Aurille cleaved him in two before a shred of essence could rush its way to anybody’s fingertips. Frost flash-froze the two halves together before they could go their separate ways and encased the undead. Lances formed over Aurille’s head without her looking. She held out her hand.

The rest of the scorn burst into motion. Three wielded a longsword, another two some kind of glaive. The remainder stayed in the back, arts forming on their lips.

Ashwing descended and turned a caster’s skull into bone paste. She beat her wings, and three arcs of flame thinner than a phalanx but longer than I was tall snapped into existence around her, then fired into the blob of unprepared undead to shear their targets in half.

‘Her control has increased.’ And I wasn’t even fuelling the ability.

My veins throbbed in excitement. Excitement which quickly vanished when the clots of essence building in the three bisected undeads didn’t dissipate, their art continuing to charge..

I pursed my lips. ‘Well, not like I expected that to work.’

I vaulted from Ashwing’s neck and took refuge in the shadow of her wings as they absorbed multiple arts like a sponge.

‘Calm Mind,’ I thought. Cool energy shot through me. It was possible to use the skill before fighting, but every activation needed more essence. So did maintaining the buff. Thus, using it in battle was the better option.

Thuds and pats reverberated through the barrier that was my summon. Ashwing fired another barrage of flame cutters, but the undead banded together to form a barrier just strong enough to keep their fate unlike those of their brethren.

That was the downside of Ashwing—she had high defensive capabilities, but if flame cutter didn’t work, she couldn’t kill anyone.

‘Outside from smashing them to pieces, that is.’

That only worked if she dove from up high, though.

Ashwing surrounded me like a mother’s belly did a child. Flickering fires followed a flex of the mind. Liquid drops of flame dropped down the sides of Skul’s mouth as he exited the gate, the azure light lighting up the darkness inside the womb. He hadn’t yet activated his spirit leech, yet his scales were already denser than before.

I touched his snout. The summon leaned into my touch.

“Ghost Guardians,” I whispered.

Cords of flame snaked out of the sides of his mouth. They trailed in the air and whirled like vortexes into loose spheres. Skul grunted. The two cores elongated until they were about the size of an average person. The result was a cross between a salamander and a drake. Long, scaled snouts and flat noses. The top of the head was small, their fangs quite wicked. Both guardians lacked a lower body and hovered in the air similar to Skul.

Ashwing allowed a gap between her wings, and the three reptiles rushed out. They curved between beams of water, light and decay. Their eyes flashed, and wisps of spirit energy leeched out of the undead into my Balekin and his guardians—one for each.

My mind honed in on my connection with Skul. His singular target turned into three, and with that, all five of the remaining caster undead were being siphoned.

I watched the rest of the fight play out. Skul’s jaw clamped down on the head of one enemy and squashed it. His guardians achieved the same but ganged up on a single enemy.

Arts slammed into the ghosts, making them lose part of the energy building in their bodies. But every technique aimed at them wasn’t aimed at Skul.

The Balekin’s arm popped into existence. His claws ripped the feet out from under one of the dead, a girl in Weapon Empire colours that’d already lost half her face before this confrontation ever began.

Skul roared. The bestial cry reverberated through the frozen treetops. No birds shot into the sky in response. There was only the trembling frost. And by the time he grew his second arm, the half a dozen undead lied in piles of varying degrees of decapitation and dissection, yet the stumps they had for limbs were still moving.

Skul hovered over them, his mouth ajar, liquid and gaseous fires gushing forth.

‘Moment of truth,’ I thought.

I calmed my mind. Skul’s bond trembled in time with the shuddering heat coursing through me. Ashwing was still enveloping me, so I was seeing the littered dead through her eyes. I cut our connection.

Darkness rushed over my position together with the residual heat from Ashwing’s presence.

‘A womb, huh.’

Was this what gestating inside the Womb Root had been like for my infant self?

Warmth crawled over my skin. I breathed in—Skul’s connection spun and tightened like a coil as his senses linked with mine.

The myriad of colours populating the world shifted into shades of blue—sky blue trees. The ground was a dark navy. Skul’s guardians were cerulean. And the undead…

I hummed. The their torsos were arctic in colour. On the inside, that was. Covering their exterior like a second skin was a blue so deep it could pass for black.

It wriggled like a pile of juvenile burrowers.

The wisps drawing out of the undead towards Skul were the small strands that managed to slip between the gaps of the second skin.

My gaze narrowed. ‘Its protecting their soul.’ If that was even what I was seeing. Skul’s ability was called Spirit Leech, but spirit energy may not be the same as the soul. That said, whatever it was, the Balekin was more than happy to suck it up.

His spine moulded into being. Scales rattled as lines of fire blazed across the hard exterior. Nails melted through the eath.

’More,’ the desire shot through our connection.

Steps carried me out of Ashwing’s embrace and towards one of the corpses. My boot planted on a white robe with a shield insignia on the front. I slowed my breathing. The sounds of battle had gone, those coming from Aurille’s direction having been absent since Ashwing smashed the first undead. Screams and cries penetrated through the silence. A presence appeared behind me, followed by an icy touch in my neck that fired an equally cold jolt all the way into my toes.

Essence shot from my core into the shard. Skul loomed over the dead. Winds picked up that kicked my hair and drew into his open maw. The taste coming up from the depths of my throat made me envision an infected rat scurrying through the sewers. Fast and insidious. I grimaced but didn’t open my eyes.

The gaps in the skin frayed…then burst like a popped pimple. All at once, the fluid inside of the undead ripped out of their skeleton and into Skul. The corpse’s incessant quivering stopped.

[Scorn - lvl. 22] x 1 slain. Extra experience awarded for killing a higher level enemy.

The drain of his Spirit Leech returned to a mere trickle. The beginnings of what must be a leg and tail trailed off into smoke.

‘More.’

I turned to the next one—

[Scorn - lvl. 23] x 1 slain. Extra experience awarded for killing a higher level enemy.

—who died quicker than the first. Now, Skul’s spine was fully formed. His claws gleamed in the unnatural light of the Tomb. The third undead died even quicker, as did the fourth and fifth. After the last undead died, the flames began to gush uncontrollably from Skul’s mouth, rippling over his sinuous body like ribbons. The power inside him trembled in search of release.

Azure eyes pierced my chest. ‘More!’ his scream echoed in my mind like the shout of some titan.

‘More what?’ I asked, knowing the answer.

Souls.

Strong beings to consume.

I held his gaze, then glanced over my shoulder through his eyes. There was nothing there except for a strange, swirling cloud of dissipating essence.

The cold from the touch had been beyond what I’d consider imagination…

“Should I undo the prisons?” a cold voice said.

I turned to the side, where Aurille was sitting cross-legged on a makeshift bench of ice. Behind her, the undead were frozen in both space and time.

“No,” I said. “We need to prepare.”

“The other group?” Aurille asked.

I nodded. My experimentation had made the fight last longer.

Ashwing took off and spied on the current lay of the battlefield.

“They’ve joined with another squad,” I said. “It’ll be around thirty in total.”

“We should be able to take more than that,” Aurille said.

Given we’d dismantled this group of a dozen.

Ashwing returned to earth. Aurille eyed her as she did so. The summon’s feathers were blackened and torn where the arts had hit her wings. Nothing her new skill wouldn’t heal, but doing so would cost me essence.

“You should keep that summon back if you can,” she said.

Indeed. Something I should do beyond wanting to keep Ashwing safe. Unlike the cinderwing tree, Saber and Skul didn’t have inferior versions of themselves. Once Skul reached late stage, I wouldn’t be able to summon either of my more offensive summons in tandem with Ashwing.

‘And that’s not far away.’

Now that I could kill undead, I could rack up experience.

My hand brushed Ashwing’s feathers one last time before she returned to the garden. The flametalon took her place. Though she wasn’t as big as Ashwing, she hadn’t failed to defend me once.

This combination also allowed me to keep one chick in the air at all times so we didn’t get ambushed.

Cool flames swept past my cheeks. Skul hovered beside me, staring into the treeline. The beginnings of his tail and leg were already vanishing.

I scratched him underneath the chin. “I’m not done with you yet.”

I had a second theory to test, and a greater number of enemies was just what I needed.