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Bk 2 Ch. 26
🕑 Added 2024-08-01 01:06:10 +0000 UTC26.
Whatever the piece of machinery had been before its untimely demise, it was large. And its death had been violent. Slagged metal poked out, making nice handholds for Santi to climb upwards. They were a bit sharp but the basic metal didn’t have the required strength to pierce his skin.
Up and up he went, twisting around the cylindrical machine as he kept one eye on the patrolling golems below him. His other eye looked for the hazy blur that was Hana. She was supposed to be keeping close to him, but he couldn’t see her. If she had been closer to him he would have been able to sense her with [Air Current].
When he was nearly forty feet up and he could stare down at the ramshackle pen, he finally got a look at the captive dwarves. Somehow Grimvr had been in better shape. His stomach twisted in disgust at their living conditions and a fury beat in his heart as he saw a fat cyclops watching them lazily as it munched on stolen food.
This was supposed to be a quiet in and out mission, but after looking around he couldn’t really see a way of making it quiet. The patrolling golems were slow, but fast enough that he couldn’t take advantage of their blind spot. The single cyclops was sitting with his back to a rough shack. It would be impossible to get to him without the cyclops seeing him and raising the alarm.
He needed Daniel to go and kill the damn monster, but Daniel was off, hopefully securing a metal based treasure for Chloe. Hana could get in, but she couldn’t cross the open ground without being seen. Santi hung there, his feet wedged into a crevasse in the metal and started judging the distances.
He thought he could make it. It wasn’t really that far. The angle looked good to him.
“Ohhhh, this is dumb,” Santi whispered as he rearranged himself on the machine. He found better footing and coiled downward. He took a breath and whispered a silent prayer to whatever it was that looked down upon him. Technically it was Akthyr, but he wasn’t going to be receiving any prayers from Santi anytime soon.
He sprung. Legs uncoiled in a burst of energy that threw him across the distance in a blink. If anything, he had overshot his goal and was likely to fly right past the sitting cyclops and through the monster's shack. He twisted in mid air and cast [Gust], bending his willpower to keep the spell attached to his hand. Even with him keeping the spell tethered to his hand, there wasn’t much recoil. If he had been standing on the ground he would have hardly noticed.
He was currently weightless and the recoil was enough to send him careening downwards toward the still unaware cyclops. A long cleaver formed in his hand, looking like an anime sword as he hurtled at the monster. At the last moment it looked up, eye widening in shock as its large mouth gaped open.
Santi split the cyclops in half, landing in a superhero crouch, blade in front of him. It exploded in a wave of gore, pulverized as it burst apart like rotten fruit in two directions. Santi froze and looked around, waiting for the Acolytle level golems to come racing through the weak panel walls to investigate.
His racing heart didn’t relent as the seconds dragged on. The thudding footsteps never slowed as the creations didn’t notice the disturbance. The dwarves hardly noticed, only two of them bothering to look at him. The rest kept laying around in their disheveled and torn clothes, their willpower destroyed by their prolonged captivity.
Santi hushed one of them when he opened his mouth and the dwarf nodded slowly. His beard was a mangled mess of black hair and one of his eyes had been gouged out, leaving angry red tissue behind. The dwarf shook the others to alertness, hushing them as they slowly rose to their feet.
A burst of motion over the fence and Hana appeared. Her shimmer of light anyways. She moved quickly past the dwarves, them not noticing her at all until she let her skill drop and stood next to Santi. A sheen of sweat covered her forehead from holding the skill for so long but she was in good spirits as she looked at the soon to be freed dwarves.
“Did you see Daniel?” Santi asked.
“No. But…that’s the point?”
Santi stared at her blankly and then shook his head as he pointed at the slowly organizing dwarves.
“You’ll have to lead them while I fight off the golems. I was hoping to see Daniel before we started the fight. Run straight for the rift exit.”
“So, follow the plan?”
“Yeah, follow the plan.”
Hana went over to the dwarves and whispered to them. They nodded along as they gathered around her while Santi waited as patiently as possible. Torin would have to be left to his own devices as there was no way they could reach the powerful dwarf.
“Hey, Santi?”
“Yeah?”
“Weren’t there supposed to be five or six cyclops here?” Hana whispered. A chill ran down Santi’s back as he looked back at the shack’s walls that would stop [Air Current] from seeing inside. A door banged open and a screaming cyclops came flying out and all their plans went down the toilet.
Santi killed the monster before it had managed to take two steps, its wide head rolling off of its shoulders to strike the ground with a loud thud. The next cyclops tripped over the dead one, sprawling to the ground and causing a pile up as the others tried to get out of the shack.
Santi didn’t hesitate as he began to cut. Each of the tall monsters died with a single blow. The high level Initiate monsters couldn’t keep up, dying before they could register what was happening.
He heard the sound of breaking wood as the golems began to break through the walls and head towards them. Santi spun and left the blood coated shack and raced out to see the metallic monsters running toward them. They were faster than they looked and the two were converging on the group of dwarves with startling speed.
[Crosscurrent-Orb] was thrown without hesitation towards the left most golem while he leapt to land in front of the right most. The spell hit the golem in an explosion of power, winds whipping around and tossing the golem off its feet and to the ground. The right most powered towards him, lifting all four of its arms up and over its head to smash down on him.
Santi turned the morph weapon into a long lance and stabbed the golem through the chest before it could reach him. It pushed down the lance, not caring at all as the lance ripped apart its internals. Santi cursed and skipped back, letting the weapon become semi-liquid and having it pool back around his arm.
The golem got close enough and brought its balled hands down. Santi danced around it, spinning on the balls of his feet as the metal hands cratered the earth where he had been standing. Santi took the golem’s leg off with a single swipe. The golem teetered and then fell to the ground.
The dwarves were racing away, Hana visible as she led them through the broken pen and out towards the forge. The golem he had thrown off its feet had gotten back to its feet and was lumbering toward him.
Santi leapt onto the downed golem and pierced its chest again with a broadsword. The morph blade sank through its body like it was cheese and Santi drug the blade back and forth severing vital parts before it could rise.
A kill notification dinged and he was moving again, interposing himself once more before the surviving golem and the retreating dwarves. He slashed and cut, spun and dodged, his blade tearing and gashing open the golem. It was strong but so slow and he was able to run circles around it as he slowly whittled it down.
It kept its lower arms close to its body, sacrificing them to keep Santi away from the more vulnerable innards that would lead to its death. Over the course of twenty seconds, Santi layered forty blows on it. Each time pieces of metal fell away until the upper arms cracked and broke off from the main body.
More and more cries were coming, the sound of metal hitting metal and the bellowing boom of cyclops dominating the air. He had to finish the golem now, or he was going to be cut off.
Santi closed the distance, putting himself in range of the lower arms to score more effective hits. Santi trusted in his stats and let the golem land a blow, trading strike for strike as the morph blade entered at the golem’s crotch and sheared upward.
Bones creaked and muscles were bruised as Santi was lifted up and into the air, tossed like a ragdoll. The golem snapped in half, the various stress inducing cuts finally causing failure as the attempted bisection was the feather on the camel’s back.
For the second time in ten minutes he was falling toward the earth and a fight. Cyclops were running everywhere and the weaker junk golems had been mobilized to chase after the fleeing prisoners. Santi just hoped that Daniel had gotten his job done before they had kicked the hornet’s nest.
